Skip to main content
MIT
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
PostJune 8, 2023

Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees”

Photo Credit
ANA MIMINOSHVILI

Fifty-three million years ago, the Earth was much warmer than it is today. Even the Arctic Ocean was a balmy 50 °F—an almost-tropical environment that looked something like Florida, complete with swaying palm trees and roving crocodiles. 

Then the world seemed to pivot. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere plummeted, and things began to cool toward today’s “icehouse” conditions, meaning that glaciers can persist well beyond the poles. 

What caused the change was, for decades, unclear. Eventually, scientists drilling into Arctic mud discovered a potential clue: a layer of fossilized freshwater ferns up to 20 meters thick. The site suggested that the Arctic Ocean may have been covered for a time in vast mats of small-leaved aquatic Azolla ferns. Azollas are among the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and the scientists theorized that if such ferns coated the ocean, they could have consumed huge quantities of carbon, helping scrub the atmosphere of greenhouse gasses and thereby cooling the planet.

Patrick Mellor, paleobiologist and chief technology officer of the biotech startup Living Carbon, sees a lesson in the story about these diminutive ferns: photosynthesis can save the world. Certain fluke conditions seem to have helped the Azollas along, though. The arrangement of continental plates at the time meant the Arctic Ocean was mostly enclosed, like a massive lake, which allowed a thin layer of fresh river water to collect atop it, creating the kind of conditions the ferns needed. And crucially, when each generation of ferns died, they settled into saltier water that helped inhibit decay, keeping microbes from releasing the ferns’ stored carbon back into the atmosphere.

Read the full story at MIT Technology Review.

by MIT Technology Review
Topics
Atmosphere
Biodiversity

Related Posts

PostAugust 21, 2023

The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past

MIT Technology Review
PostAugust 17, 2023

Bianca Champenois SM ’22 Helps Model the Future for Coastal Industries

MIT Spectrum
Aerial photograph of an ocean wave crashing
PostJuly 11, 2023

The UN just set a net-zero goal for shipping. Here’s how that could work....

MIT Technology Review
Cargo ship loaded with cargo boxes
PostJuly 7, 2023

Battle for a Better Future

MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
An aircraft dumps water on the edge of the Elmo Fire burning on the western shore of Flathead Lake on August 1, 2022.

MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

 
 

MIT Groups Log In

Log In

Footer

  • About
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Contact
Environmental Solutions Initiative
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA 02139-4307
Communicator Award Winner
Communicator Award Winner