In #worldaborday at #spacewhale we want to celebrate the positively bewildering variety of plant species on Earth 🌎.
The tree you see is the famous #curtainfigtree or giant curtain-shaped fig tree, a specimen of more than 500 years in #farnorthqueensland #australia where we took the photo in December 2019. It is one of the largest trees in Australia with about 50 meters high and about 30 meters in diameter of its cup, it is an authentic natural spectacle.
The Strangling Fig tree is also named for its growth pattern by wrapping an original tree that uses as scaffolding to look for light and often results in the death of the host, a common technique of growth in the highly competitive tropical area where thousands of plant silvers compete to grab as much sunlight as possible.
Plants and trees are a part of the planet’s lungs, being able to absorb amounts of CO2 and producing oxygen for free so that all animal species can breathe.
It was not always so and before the colonization of photosynthetic plants the Earth’s original atmosphere was rich in methane, ammonia, water vapour and noble gas neon, but lacked available oxygen. When the Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago of a hot mixture of gases and solids, it had almost no atmosphere.
The surface was a sea of lava. While the Earth cooled an atmosphere formed mainly of gases from volcanic sulfide activity of hydrogen, methane, and between 10 and 200 times more carbon dioxide than today’s atmosphere.
2.7 billion years ago, blue green microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria flourished in the Earth’s oceans.
Thus began the production of gaseous oxygen by hijacking carbon dioxide as well as water and sunlight, the process is undoubtedly one of the most perfect biological systems in the universe photosynthesis.
As cyanobacteria created more free oxygen, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere reached 1 of the current level, which is 21 allowing the continuous colonization of the planet by plants and trees and turning the sky blue. #worldarborday