How long would atmospheric oxygen last on Earth if plants stopped making it? [closed]








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A few years ago a rather dubious paper appeared in a mathematical biology journal. The gist of it was that warming oceans could stop oceanic plankton making oxygen (according to a somewhat simplistic model). If this happened, one of the authors claimed that sea-level air could be reduced to the oxygen levels at the top of everest in 100 years. [This report](https://russgeorge.net/2016/06/17/plankton-will-stop-making-oxygen-by-end-of-century/) quotes one author saying:



> 
> By 2100, the earth at sea level could have atmospheric oxygen levels comparable to the top of Mount Everest today. And as far as I know, people cannot normally stay on Everest without oxygen masks for more than a few minutes...
> 
> 
> 


This poses several problems and the authors have subsequently modified their claims.


So I posed a question about it on [Skeptics.SE](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/38300/3943) but that got bogged down in arguments about whether answers counted as original research.


So I thought I'd ask a simpler, but relevant, question here since the result is about atmospheric chemistry. Let's assume all oxygen production on earth has stopped. How long would the oxygen in the atmosphere last?


NB I'm not interested in the model (it has been widely rubbished). I'm interested in the basic facts of atmospheric chemistry which should be a far simpler background question to answer.


