SciTechDaily
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The arrival of plants on land about 400 million years ago may have changed the way the Earth naturally regulates its own climate, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL (University College London) and Yale.
The carbon cycle, the process through which carbon moves between rocks, oceans, living organisms and the atmosphere, acts as Earth’s natural thermostat, regulating its temperature over long time periods.
In a new study, published in the journal Nature, researchers looked at samples from rocks spanning the last three billion years and found evidence of a dramatic change in how this cycle functioned about 400 million years ago, when plants started to colonize land.