The Plant That Could Save The World
Azolla: A plant that could reverse climate change
Climate change is the biggest threat to mankind. It’s a looming armageddon. It’s the elephant in every room, only much more deadly. The good news is that globally we are doing a lot to slow down the effects. The bad news is we may have already passed the ‘tipping point’ as our C0² exceeds 400 parts per million (ppm). This means it could get hot enough to melt ancient ice, releasing vast amounts of C0² and methane that has been trapped for millions of years, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect, which will boil the Earth. So, to save ourselves and the World, we not only need to stop the damage we are doing now but reverse decades of human planetary abuse. How on Earth can we do that?!
Well, our planet has dramatically cooled in the past so why don’t we replicate the mechanisms that caused one of these events?
One of the larger of these events was the Azolla Event 49 million years ago. A tiny cute plant called the Azolla fern caused the world to go from a hot-house, with palm trees and turtles living at the poles, to the beginning of the fridged Ice Ages. The epitome of tiny yet mighty, you can still find these adorable plants in rivers and lakes around the world.
