imagine if there was no nitrogen in the air and you lit a fire.what would happen to the fire?
Answers
Answer:
Nitrogen takes up 78% of our atmosphere. Despite it being a relatively inert gas, it plays quite an important role for life. So, let’s see what happens when nitrogen isn’t present in the air anymore.
Scenario 1: All the nitrogen is removed
Currently, the atmospheric pressure is about 100kpa. By estimation, if we remove all the nitrogen from the air, the atmosphere now only exerts 22kpa of pressure, about 20% of what it initially exerted. This reduction in pressure has some unpleasant consequences.
The lowest pressure humans can withstand is about 6300 pascals, which means that humans won’t die (yet). However, it would probably be quite uncomfortable walking around in such a low-pressure environment. Our own bodies exert an outward pressure of around 100kpa to counter our atmosphere’s crushing pressure, which would probably make the pressure difference of around 80kpa rather uncomfortable for humans. Animals also face this same fate.
In addition, now that the atmosphere is 95% oxygen, this means that everything is extremely flammable. This high concentration of oxygen makes it extremely easy for anything that’s flammable to start burning, since it’s in such high concentration now.
In this case, all we need is a spark and we set everything on fire, and Everyone Dies™
However, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s try and prolong our suffering a bit by replacing our nitrogen with another inert gas- let’s try argon.
Scenario 2: Replace Nitrogen with another inert gas
Ignoring the effects of argon (we can discuss that another time), taking away nitrogen from the atmosphere still has extremely severe consequences.
Although we and the rest of life on Earth is temporarily saved from depressurisation, atmospheric nitrogen still plays an important part in the nitrogen cycle.
As it happens, nitrogen is one of the most important elements to life. It’s a component of nitrates, amino acids, proteins, etc. Specifically, bacteria in the soil convert nitrogen into nitrates, nitrites and other important compounds that are essential to plant life.
With all the nitrogen removed from the atmosphere, this has an immediate effect on the nitrogen cycle, and of course us humans, since the entire food chain depends on plants. Plants would find it much harder to survive without nitrogen fixation, which in turn could result in food shortages due to a shortage of plants.
As a result, once again, Everyone Dies
It’s not hard to see why nitrogen shouldn’t be removed from the atmosphere.
Explanation:
If there is no nitrogen in atmosphere, so air would now mostly comprise of oxygen and carbon dioxide, lots of animals and living creatures would die because of the incredibly high concentrations of these gases. Nitrogen is also used by plants for photosynthesis.
Air will never spontaneously combust, nor can it be made to burn non-spontaneously. Air is mostly nitrogen, which is not flammable. Nitrogen is also non-reactive in general, so it doesn't support the combustion of other materials, either.
So fire will not last for long.