The incredible origins of you: Here’s where your body's atoms were a million years ago

4 parts account for 96 per cent of your mass: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. Oxygen makes up over 61 per cent of your mass, in contrast with hydrogen at simply 10 per cent, however hydrogen is a a lot lighter aspect, so round 63 per cent of your atoms are hydrogen atoms, 24 per cent oxygen and 12 per cent carbon.

Most of your hydrogen atoms come from the water you drink, and if that is faucet water from a reservoir, then 100 years in the past these atoms may have been in any of the world’s oceans. Groundwater aquifers change water extra slowly although, over timescales of a number of thousand years. So even 1,000 years in the past, a number of the hydrogen in your physique might have been within the groundwater beneath your toes.

Your oxygen atoms bought into your physique from the air you breathe. Gases within the ambiance are churned in a chaotic means by the climate, nevertheless it’s secure to imagine that any given oxygen atom may have been anyplace on the planet as just lately as a number of years in the past.

Your carbon and nitrogen atoms come from meals, and immediately’s globalised agriculture additionally imports these atoms from all around the world. One million years in the past is lengthy sufficient that almost all of your atoms had been evenly distributed all through the planet’s floor and ambiance. A few of them would have been certain up in rocks, ready to be weathered and launched into the ambiance or absorbed by vegetation.

However round 5,000 tonnes of recent materials falls to Earth yearly from area. So, it's a statistical certainty that 1,000,000 years in the past, a number of the atoms destined to type you had been trapped in asteroids, flying via area on trajectories that may ultimately collide with Earth.

Learn extra:

• Am I extra micro organism than human?
• What's the human physique manufactured from?
• How a lot salt is in a human physique?
• What are the highest 10 parts within the human physique?

Requested by: Peter Jackson, Cornwall

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