Plants not only suffer from climate change, they also shape the Earth

Madrid. Plants are not simply victims of climate change, but have helped shape habitable conditions on Earth, a new study reveals.

In hundreds of millions of years, a series of climate changes have occurred that have shaped the Earth as we know it today. Past changes in carbon dioxide levels and temperature help understand the planet’s current response to global warming.

As part of a growing field called biogeodynamics, researchers are racing to understand how such modifications have impacted life on the planet in the past.

In an article published in the magazine Science Advances, Julian Rogger, a biogeodynamics specialist at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, and his colleagues at ETH and the University of Leeds argue that such plants are not just passive participants in the Earth’s climate cycle: they can play an important role in your configuration.

Rogger used computer models that simulate the interaction between climate change, the movement of continents and plant life in the distant past; indicate that plants likely help regulate the composition of the planet’s atmosphere by trapping carbon and emitting oxygen, which helps control carbon dioxide levels. They also accelerate the mineral weathering process of soils, thereby consuming this greenhouse gas.

Models suggest that climate and atmosphere are part of a feedback loop: life plays a role in regulating or accelerating climate changes.

When these are slow (slow enough for plants to evolve or spread to new niches over millions of years), plant activity can act as a buffer, preventing temperatures from changing too quickly.

However, geology and the fossil record show that there were also changes that occurred too quickly and caused significant alterations in vegetation and even mass extinctions.

We want to know how quickly vegetation can change its characteristics when the world suddenly warms by five or six degrees.says Rogger. The general objective is to understand the coevolution of climate, vegetation and tectonics.

The researchers, a team of geologists, computer scientists and earth scientists, created a computer model of the past 390 million years that took into account changes in the continents and climate and the response of vegetation to these changes.