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Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

news.exeter.ac.uk

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Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#21

Post by [deleted] »

chowells wrote: post #15
cj wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it really matters, but the article also refers to it as “drawing water to the top”. That seems more representative of reality than “pumping water from the bottom”.

If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.…

[deleted]

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#24

Post by rolph »

rolph wrote: post #11
leni536 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you call it?

more like capillary action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem#Cohesion-tension_theory

the research is relevant to the issue of transpiration column hieght as a postulated limitation to overall hieght of any tree.

a column of water is pulled by hydrogen bonding between molecules in a tug of war fashion, the top of the column is where water is dissociated from the column at such a rate as to maintain low pressure with respect to the column[xylem]

in summary water moves from bottom to top in a transpiration stream, that ultimately ejects water vapour from the leaves, resulting in a low efficiency mechanism, that loses a lot of the water but occurs at such a rate that the low efficiency is "good enough" for whats needed.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#25

Post by hinkley »

calibas wrote: post #23

The largest tree on record is rejected in part because it's over the theoretical limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nooksack_Giant Too bad we cut it down, along with almost every other giant Douglas-fir.

There are stories that the moss on trees in temperate rainforests allow the tree to pull water from their branches instead of the ground, increasing their max height.

For a while there were people poaching the moss that facilitated this, which is a problem because it grows only inches per year.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#26

Post by tenuousemphasis »

pulvinar wrote: post #20
chowells wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.…

The trick for trees is capillaries, which change the equation. The 10 meter limit only applies to larger columns. With capillaries there's a high negative tension that allows evaporation from leaves to pull the xylem sap up 100 meters or more. There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop i…

>if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input

... that would be the least of the tree's problems.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#27

Post by ryanmcbride »

hinkley wrote: post #25
calibas wrote: post #23

The largest tree on record is rejected in part because it's over the theoretical limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nooksack_Giant Too bad we cut it down, along with almost every other giant Douglas-fir.

There are stories that the moss on trees in temperate rainforests allow the tree to pull water from their branches instead of the ground, increasing their max height. For a while there were people poaching the moss that facilitated this, which is a problem because it grows only inches per year.

God that's sad. We really can't have anything nice.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#28

Post by hinkley »

pulvinar wrote: post #20
chowells wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.…

The trick for trees is capillaries, which change the equation. The 10 meter limit only applies to larger columns. With capillaries there's a high negative tension that allows evaporation from leaves to pull the xylem sap up 100 meters or more. There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop i…

One of the things Susan Simard proved was that deep rooted trees that had found subterranean water continue pulling that water at full speed at night when transpiration is low, and that water finds its way into the fungal networks in the soil and into nearby plants.

Simard attributes intention to this, but osmosis is “fair”. It seeks to move water to where sugars are and sugars to where water is. So a plant giving up sugars will receive water, and one low on water will give up sugars in the process of equalization.

Do fungi contain pumps to maintain disequilibrium in this work? I could not say. But even when they first learned the trick of tapping roots the basic premise would have worked in a rudimentary fashion woth no further optimization.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#29

Post by hinkley »

IsTom wrote: post #7
gitaarik wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Trees contain lots of thin, hollow vessels and they suck water upwards by creating low pressure at the top,” So sucking / pulling?

So a suction pump?

My recollection is that capillary action is a little from column a and a little from column b.

Re: Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

#30

Post by efskap »

m463 wrote: post #16

on the other hand, many giant trees get the water out of the air via fog: Coalescence of coastal fog accounts for a considerable part of the trees' water needs.[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens#Fog_and_f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens

Similarly, it blows my mind that all trees are made of air, specifically the carbon in it. I used to think that the biomass must come from the soil, but reality is more interesting.
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