#azollaevent — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #azollaevent, aggregated by home.social.
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🌿 49 million years ago, a tiny floating fern called Azolla carpeted the entire Arctic Ocean in an 800,000 year bloom that reshaped the planet's climate.
The Arctic was warm then, with 13°C surface temperatures, home to alligators and giant tortoises. Freshwater from rivers floated on dense saltwater, creating a perfect nursery for Azolla. This super-plant doubled its biomass every 2-3 days, and when it died, it sank into anoxic depths where it could not rot, locking carbon into sediment forever.
Atmospheric CO2 crashed from 3,500 ppm to 650 ppm, an 80 percent drop driven largely by a single fern species. This pulled Earth out of its hothouse state and into the icehouse climate we still live in today. The Arctic cooled from 13°C to -9°C, and for the first time in over 500 million years, both poles had permanent ice.