Planetary nitrification: could it work?

Imagine an alien species arrived on Earth, to find that the nitrogen in the air was toxic to them. Imagine they wanted to terraform our planet, and decided to fix this problem by nitrifying a lot of our atmosphere.

They wouldn't want to completely halt the nitrogen cycle; they'd just want to convert enough nitrogen into nitrates so that they wouldn't die the minute they left their spaceship. So my question is, if they took this course of action, and, say, the nitrogen concentration in the atmosphere was halved, would that create some kind of ecological crisis that would only make their living here more problematic?

And if it is so that converting so much nitrogen into nitrates would be pointless because denitrifying bacteria will only return the nitrogen to the atmosphere, could they convert the nitrogen into another unreactive compound without effecting all the plants that need nitrates for growth and protein production?

Note: I know that there are actually two steps to convert nitrogen into nitrates, but I've just used 'nitrification' as a shortcut.

posted almost 9 years ago

ewokbarbarian‭

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