Plants saved Earth from permanent ice age?

Nick Stockton asks, at Wired, why didn’t the ice ages that began at 800,000 ago just remain? What reversed the cooling trend?

A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how those rocks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they wear down—leaving just enough CO2 out there to trap solar warmth, and gradually bring summer back. More.

Most ecology on the planet actually depends on plants. Everything seems organized around them, including temperatures.

See also: How plants see, hear, smell, and respond without animal sense organs

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2017 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana