Planet Earth witnessing rapid decline in oxygen levels and scientists don't know why!

New Delhi: The Earth's oxygen levels are decreasing at an alarming rate and this has gotten worse over the past 100 years.

A new study has come out with this discovery, which has the scientists in a fix. The study, published in the journal Science by Daniel Stolper, a professor from Princeton University, presents data measured from small air bubbles trapped in ice on Greenland and Antarctica.

The scientists also found that the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere declined 0.7 percent in the past 800,000, which is not a big deal. But the cause for concern is that, it fell at a speedy 0.1 percent in the last century.

The scientists have dismissed signs of immediate danger, but they feel that the problem is probably caused by the rise in carbon dioxide levels from burning massive quantities of fossil fuels over the past 100 years.

“We did this analysis more out of interest than any expectation,” Stolper told Gizmodo. “We didn’t know whether oxygen would be going up, down or flat. It turns out there is a very clear trend.”

Even though carbon dioxide concentrations do fluctuate over vast swaths of geologic time, they aren’t sure what caused the long-term decline.