Terrestrial plants may have caused the End-Devonian Extinction, but its origin is still shrouded in mystery.
, which occurred at the end of the Devonian period, around 359 million years ago. Organisms on the bottom of the food chain, algae and bacteria, perished. Herbivores and predators followed suit.
“The two leading theories are cooling and the spread of anoxia in the marine environment,” says Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati. “The fact of the matter is that they both occurred simultaneously, and they both may have played a role.” Through a process called “chemical weathering,” plants extract biologically useful nutrients from the ground. “Plants exude organic acids from their roots that break down mineral matter releasing certain ions that they then take up for the purpose of growth,” Algeo says.
The proliferation of land plants might also explain the cooling temperatures. When plants respirate, a process as essential as breathing is to humans, they consume carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. At a large scale and over a long period of time, this lowers the concentration of CO2, the second most plentiful greenhouse gas on earth. Land plants may have cooled the earth significantly during the late Devonian just by breathing.
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