• CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world
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    4 months ago

    It always staggers me when I remember that for roughly sixty million years during the Carboniferous Period, there were trees but no microorganisms capable of decomposing them.

    Just sixty million years of branches falling off and trees falling down and… just sitting there on the ground, not rotting at all.

  • affiliate@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    but imagine you’ve just gotten use to living on a moss planet over the past 40 million years, and now all of a sudden you walk outside and all the moss is gone

  • ngwoo@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The ocean was purple once, and another time the only thing taller than little bushes were twenty foot tall mushrooms shaped like asparagus

  • finley@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Fortunately, there was no thinking until a very long time after that.

    Well, not by life indigenous to Earth, anyway.

  • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Just like there is SpaceEngine, we need a Earth sim that let’s us to back to any time and have a realistic simulation of that epoch based on the best of modern knowledge.

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Now I’m curious if there’d be any massive gaps in the timeline, where we don’t know if we could reasonably pick any fitting environment to render.

        • Syd@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Woah, do you have any other interesting info on early earth?

          • sushibowl@feddit.nl
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            4 months ago

            Nowadays, trees absorb CO2 and produce oxygen, and when they die and rot the opposite happens, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.

            However, during the carboniferous period, when plants first developed the ability to produce lignin (i.e. wood, essentially) there was not yet any bacteria or fungus that could break this material down. The result is that when trees died they would kinda just lay there. For 50 million years, trees absorbed CO2 and then toppled over and piled on the ground and in water. Most of the world was swamp and rainforest. Millions of years of plant growth all dying and laying on top of each other

            So much CO2 was turned into oxygen that O2 levels were 15% higher compared to today. This allowed some truly large lifeforms to develop: trees 150 feet tall, dragonflies with wings 13 inches long, millipedes the size of a car.

            The trapping of so much CO2 led to a reverse greenhouse effect, cooling the planet, and eventually an ice age. The forest systems collapsed from the climate change (we think) killing about 10% of all life on earth. Eventually a species of fungus developed the ability to eat lignin, and cleaned up the dead trees that remained on the surface within a few generations. The millions of years of tree material that sank into the bogs eventually turned into coal.

            Now we’re digging all that good stuff back up and are burning it, yay!

            • Valmond@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Didn’t they just lay around until there was a lightning induced forest fire? I mean until the fungus arrived.

              Nice writeup BTW!

              • sushibowl@feddit.nl
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                4 months ago

                Sort of, yeah. Plant matter with lignins still partially decayed into peat. So it’s not exactly 50 million years of dead trees on top of each other. It’s more like layers and layers of peat, with still “fresh” trees at the top.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.

    So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.

    Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.

    And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 months ago

    Thanks for make me realize that I had that big of a timespan to live in a beautiful mossy earth and I just missed it and landed on scorched land earth.

  • nikaaa@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can’t find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?

    Edit:

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    Certainly not all land of earth. Moss requires moisture to survive and lacks the root system of developed plants to get water deep in the soil.

  • Eiri@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    On the flip side, if you could time travel to that epoch, the ground would be extremely comfy for your feet.