Well I did in fact read the article, and that doesn’t answer my question about MASS. The new oxygen is being created from materials that are already on this planet, while some mass is slowly being lost into space. Lost mass means the planet as a whole has a lower gravitational pull. So is that cumulative mass over millions of years enough to account for the moon slowly pulling away, or is that entirely due to the moon’s orbit being just slightly faster than the Earth’s gravity pulls it back? Which comes back to the original question of whether the accumulation of meteor strikes makes up for the mass of oxygen being lost to space, or if the Earth actually weighs less now than it did say 100 million years ago?
Well I did in fact read the article, and that doesn’t answer my question about MASS. The new oxygen is being created from materials that are already on this planet, while some mass is slowly being lost into space. Lost mass means the planet as a whole has a lower gravitational pull. So is that cumulative mass over millions of years enough to account for the moon slowly pulling away, or is that entirely due to the moon’s orbit being just slightly faster than the Earth’s gravity pulls it back? Which comes back to the original question of whether the accumulation of meteor strikes makes up for the mass of oxygen being lost to space, or if the Earth actually weighs less now than it did say 100 million years ago?
The mass that’s being lost through this process is infinitesimal in the great scheme of things.