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When photo-vores covered all the land the only place left to go was up. But Lignin was what emerged as the scaffold and it was amazingly successful and complete
by tejtm 5y ago
When photo-vores covered all the land the only place left to go was up. But Lignin was what emerged as the scaffold and it was amazingly successful and completely indigestible.
It would be as if animals figured out how to make their bones out of Teflon or silicon dioxide, after a few tens of millions of years the planet would be hundreds of feet deep in old non decomposed skeletons.
- dzdt 5y agoMy favorite analogy is it is like trees were made of plastic. You know how today people say the plastic bottles will sit unchanged in landfills for thousands of years? Back then it was the same for trees. They grew, they fell, they sat there unchanged unless they burned. So if they fell in water, they stayed. Today trees rot because microbes evolved to decompose lignin. A million years from now maybe plastic will rot too. It helps to make clear how the giant carboniferous coal deposits were formed: plastic tree landfills.
- morpheos137 5y agoIt would be cool if somebody could model what the landscape then would look like. I don't think there would be massive piles of wood anywhere but wet places because as you indicated fire is another way dead wood can be cleared.
- eloff 5y agoThat's a good analogy. There already appear to be bacteria evolving to eat some kinds of plastic. I don't think it will take millions of years. But it will also reduce demand for plastic, because like wood and paper, it will be able to rot. At least nature may bail us out of that mistake we made with plastic. Could you imagine if we used it for millions of years without it being able to decompose? Your analogy would become reality.
- d110af5ccf 5y agoBacteria that eat PET were isolated from a recycling site in ~2016. https://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles.html https://phys.org/news/2016-03-newly-bacteria-plastic-bottles...