Yes, but don’t worry; the number of molecules and ions escaping our atmosphere is very tiny and will not deplete our atmosphere significantly for billions of years. Scientists monitoring the magnetosphere learned that periodic changes in the magnetosphere help to accelerate particles, especially ions, with enough speed to escape Earth’s gravity. If the Earth’s gravity were weaker, however, this interaction might have caused our planet to lose its atmosphere at a significant rate. Indeed, some astronomers speculate that this may be what happened to Mars’s atmosphere.