It wasn’t NASA tho - it was the International Astronomical Union (IAU):
NASA’s New Horizons mission made a close pass of Pluto this week. For more than 70 years, Pluto was one of nine planets recognised in our Solar System.
But in 2006, it was relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). So why was Pluto demoted?
Not plants and bacteria, many of them can survive off sunlight and minerals broken down from stones, such as lichen. Although I guess lichen is a combination of plants, bacteria and fungi
plants and bacteria would struggle without animals and fungi as well, everything depends on like literally the entire earth’s ecosystems to survive to some degree.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
this is just such a cool thing to think about, there was a time when there were just dead trees everywhere in forests, like just laying there being logs or whatever, just piles and piles of dead trees and that’s where coal comes from.
The people mining and dying and polluting the planet just digging out piles of dead trees.
Sporopollenin, recognized as one of the most chemically resilient biological polymers, forms a crucial component of the robust outer (exine) walls of spores and pollen grains in plants. It’s been found in rock up to 500,000 years old iirc.
I wonder if they were specimens that were ideally fossilized, but only in a portion of a tectonic plate that was eventually pushed below the mantle and liquefied into molten lava.
Exotic skeletons from hundreds of hyper localized species, all pristinely preserved in so much detail miraculously for millions of years due, only to eventually turn into very hot rock just before ever returning to the near surface for paleontology discovery.
Time on earth makes for very lossy data archive. Ohhh, the entropy!
science_memes
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.