this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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The Azolla Event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event. I mean it is cool and the major climate shift it helped create certainly caused some extinctions. But plants can change the world, never forget!
Very cool!
It reminds me of my fav, The Oxygen Catastrophy, where basically a plant did something new and caused the earth to freeze. In this case, by converting methane to carbon dioxide, a much weaker greenhouse gas.
Ooh, since this is a safe space for dorks, I would like to be pedantic myself. Thank you for the opportunity. The oxygen catastrophe was caused by cyanobacteria-like organisms, which are photosynthetic, but are not plants. But itβs true, all bio-mass matters!
That's interesting. What makes cyanobacteria distinct from plants?
The first thing that comes to mind is that bacteria are prokaryotes, while plants are eukaryotes. They have internal membranes, called thylakoids, in which they do photosynthesis, but chloroplasts in plants are fully-developed organelles with their own DNA. If I recall correctly, the current thinking is that chloroplasts developed from endosymbiotic cyanobacteria.
Yeah I knew they weren't plants but it made the analogy easier to pretend they were π
They have plant-ey vibes
They were all like "let's get the Calvin cycle up in this house, lets light it up!" And so they did, and the atmosphere caught fire