The Fern That Cooled the Planet
Over its lifetime, the Earth has seen plenty of climate change. About 50 million years ago the planet experienced extreme cooling, and all from a little fern. We've been nominated for a Webby!...
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Let’s talk about climate change, and I don’t mean the kind that’s happening right now. I mean the massive shift in climate that happened about 50 million years back, when Earth went from toasty warm to ice age. And that huge change may have mostly been caused by … a fern. Alright, so Earth was really hot 50 million years ago. I’m talking like, total greenhouse planet, lots of CO2 in the air, palm trees and alligators living near the poles. That kind of hot. Then something happened. The planet started to slowly cool, and all those poor gators had to relocate as the poles eventually formed ice caps, and the climate eventually shifted into cycles of hundred-thousand-year ice ages with shorter breaks in between them. In 2004, an Arctic Coring Expe...
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Let’s talk about climate change, and I don’t mean the kind that’s happening right now. I mean the massive shift in climate that happened about 50 million years back, when Earth went from toasty warm to ice age. And that huge change may have mostly been caused by … a fern. Alright, so Earth was really hot 50 million years ago. I’m talking like, total greenhouse planet, lots of CO2 in the air, palm trees and alligators living near the poles. That kind of hot. Then something happened. The planet started to slowly cool, and all those poor gators had to relocate as the poles eventually formed ice caps, and the climate eventually shifted into cycles of hundred-thousand-year ice ages with shorter breaks in between them. In 2004, an Arctic Coring Expe...
