The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth's History
David Beerling
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN: B00M3SB5DI
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Global warming is contentious and difficult to measure, even among the majority of scientists who agree that it is taking place. Will temperatures rise by 2ºC or 8ºC over the next hundred years? Will sea levels rise by 2 or 30 feet? The only way that we can accurately answer questions like these is by looking into the distant past, for a comparison with the world long before the rise of mankind. We may currently believe that atmospheric shifts, like global warming, result from our impact on the planet, but the earth's atmosphere has been dramatically shifting since its creation. Drawing on evidence from fossil plants and animals, computer models of the atmosphere, and experimental studies, David Beerling reveals the crucial role that plants have played in determining atmospheric change--and hence the conditions on the planet we know today-- something that has often been overlooked amidst the preoccuputations with dinosaur bones and animal fossils. "Beerling uses evidence from the plant fossil record (mutant spores, tree stumps from the Artic and Antarctic, growth rings) to reconstruct past climates and to help explain mass extinctions. Too often this evidence has been disregarded, but Beerling gives it its due, and then some."--BioScience
Wood Structure and Environment (Springer Series in Wood Science)
The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans
Elsevier's Dictionary of Trees: Volume 1: North America
The Lakes Handbook, Volume 1: Limnology and Limnetic Ecology
Preserving not only the spectacular dinosaur skeletons adorning the magnificent display halls, but also preserving and cataloguing the dramatic story of how plants evolved. By mining the collection of fossil plants held in museums across Europe, from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm across to the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt and down to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, researchers have analysed three hundred specimens of fossil plants. The.
Series of eight lengthy papers, each more difficult than the last, undertaken over a period of nine days. In rank order, the first 30-40 were called wranglers; the man gaining the highest marks of the year held the enviable position of Senior Wrangler. By tradition the positions were published in the London Times, with the accompanying list carrying pictures and short biographies of the top finishers; being a wrangler conveyed a certain degree of national honour and university distinction.
Summers and winters doubling. Astonishingly, the Antarctic forests at 85 °S lived in a region blanketed by darkness for half the year, when making a living by photosynthesis would have been impossible. How the ancient polar forests coped with the unusual combination of climatic warmth and an extreme seasonality in sunlight is revealed by the annual growth rings preserved in fossil woods.34 Growth rings are the visual manifestation of the environmental influence exerted each year on a tree’s.
Then, that climate change can cause the decline and fall of C3 forests and the establishment of C4 grasses, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. There are other important influences at work that we are only beginning to appreciate. Exciting new detail was added to the picture when the South African workers William Bond and Guy Midgley realized they could improve upon the ‘carbon dioxide starvation’ hypothesis.63 Thinking radically, they realized there was another way of looking at the.
Cycads, and the like enjoyed a carbon dioxide rich-atmosphere, they, too, were more sensitive to frost? Certainly, the evidence so far indicates this is the case for a range of ancient plant taxa, including frost-hardy palms.14 The cautionary tale here is that the climatic tolerances of plants cannot be assumed to be fixed, immutable to the sands of time. Physiology matters, especially when carbon dioxide is brought into the equation, and the wise paint a sharper portrait of Earth’s ancient.