The world becomes a cooler and wetter place thanks to flowering plants, according to a recent research.
This effect is particularly pronounced in the Amazon basin where there could be an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by wet rainforest if flowering plants were replaced with non-flowering plants.
From in.news.yahoo.com:
This makes the flowering plants highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where it can return to Earth as rain.
‘The whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and transpiration would have been much lower in the absence of flowering plants. We can know that because no leaves throughout the fossil record approach the vein densities seen in flowering plant leaves,’ Boyce added.
For most of biological history there were no flowering plants known. They evolved about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period.
Dinosaurs walked the Earth when flowering plants evolved, and various studies have attempted to link the extinction of dinosaurs or at least their evolutionary paths to flowering plant evolution. ‘Those efforts are always very fuzzy, and none have gained much traction,’ Boyce said.
According to study’s lead author, C. Kevin Boyce, Associate professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago (UofC), the vein density of leaves in flowering plants is much higher than all other plants. This effect leads to absorption of more carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, which means more loss of water vapors from the plant.
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