i've never seen a good visualization of the variety of non-animal landscapes across geologic time
Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
141–150 of 295 posts
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars. It's many orders of magnitude easier to afford a $100,000,000 home if you make $10,000 per year than if you only make $1 per year. But you're never going to afford that home either way.
We reversed the Chicago River 120 years ago, protected the Netherlands from flooding for centuries, blasted out the bed of the East River to make New York one of the most successful ports in history, laid at least one canal through every major ithsmus, and built dozens of reservoirs and irrigation systems into every hydrological ecosystem that touches a major population center. That's just water projects.
None of these are even remotely close to terraforming.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#143what is the evolutionary advantage of being so big back then?
Dispersing more spores, from a higher altitude, so they go further?
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#144I recently discovered that flowers didn't exist in most of the Jurassic era. Mind-blowing really.
Even more recent than flowering plants: Grass.
> Before 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved around 55 million years ago. Finds of grass-like phytoliths in Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites from the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) aged Lameta Formation of India have pushed this date back to 66 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
For reference, dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#145The interesting thing is that no one has any idea where life came from in the first place.
Problem is that there are no fossils. The only evidence of the first cells are similarities between eukaryotes and prokaryotes.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#146It's hard to get your head around the idea that there was a time when there was no grass, no trees or other plants. Really interesting.
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#147The title is misleading, the article is more honest in admitting that it is thought that these things named prototaxites are a fungus, but we are not sure.
Ok, we've replaced giant mushrooms with prototaxites in the title above. Thanks!
Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have been agressively terraforming the earth into a form less accomodating of current complex life for some time now, and we show no signs of slowing. That's the whole problem
Agressively? We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 . Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environ…
Yes aggressively. Raising the average (I don't understand why you'd bring up noise when discussing average) temperature of the entire Earth by 1-2 degrees C in a period of 100 years, from 1 single organism is remarkable. Any why specify CO2 as if that's the only thing we're polluting with? What about methane? Remember when we disrupted the ozone layer? What about pollution with plastics, and industrial chemicals in land and water?
And don't forget that the Earth is more than willing to enter a negative feedback loop -- she will take that 1-2 degree increase in temperature and say "I heard you like warm weather, so I'm gonna release all this trapped methane and CO2 from my frozen parts and let you have it too."
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have been agressively terraforming the earth into a form less accomodating of current complex life for some time now, and we show no signs of slowing. That's the whole problem
Agressively? We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 . Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environ…
"Globally agricultural land area is approximately five billion hectares, or 38 percent of the global land surface. About one-third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures) for grazing livestock."
https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
Re: Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.
It’s really up to China and, increasingly, India at this point. The Western countries are not emitting much anymore so the impact here is limited.
We can stop buying things from China and India then.