Early Plants May Have Caused Massive Glaciation

sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science: "The first plants to colonize land didn't merely supply a dash of green to a drab landscape. They dramatically accelerated the natural breakdown of exposed rocks, according to a new study, drawing so much planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere that they sent Earth's climate spiraling into a major ice age."

Comments

Re:Easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

1) We must conserve water
2) Global warming is simply a return to the previous state
3) If you're growing ganja, OK then.

Re:not to mention...

[Samantha Wright]

Well, at the time there was a major debate about whether or not that would happen. A lot of proto-Earth's top scientist algae were certain that releasing so much oxygen would irreversibly alter the environment and seriously affect non-oxygen-respiring organisms, but there were many plants who maintained that the young planet had already seen worse, and yet life existed in the current day despite that. What the poor, innocent archaeans who bought into all of this didn't realise was that the smooth-talking photosynthesisers were more interested in the production and stockpile of carbohydrates than the well-being of the other clades, and had already convinced themselves that whether or not the planet could support infinite population and ecological growth was not their concern.

Conflict of interest: The author declares that she has no conflicts of interest and is clearly not trolling, nor taking a joke too far to farm karma.