As I said a couples of posts ago, we have started Ecology in Biology IB. Today in our lesson, we talked about climate change. more particularly, about how the CO2 levels affect to the global temperature and they both increase and decrease together at the same rate.
(Photo credit: Bioknlowledgy)
This afternoon I was watching a couple of videos from SciShow (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZYTClx2T1of7BRZ86-8fow) and I was really surprised when I realized that yesterday they posted a video about this exact same thing!
Link to the video:
What the video is talking about is one of the main hypothesis about how the earth’s temperature drastically decreased 50 million years ago. And this reason is a Fern called Azolla, a small fern that lives over fresh water which flourished around 50 million years ago in the northern arctic sea, covering millions of square kilometers and almost lowering the CO2 levels in the atmosphere by half. By doing this, as CO2 is a gas which contributes to the greenhouse effect, the temperature was reduced drastically, leading to a new glacial period.
A lot of research is being done at the moment about Azolla, and one of the main questions that the researchers want to solve is… Would Azolla be able to cool down the earth AGAIN under the right conditions?
But this is just a little summary, in the video they explain it much deeply and better, so, go check it out!
No comments:
Post a Comment