Categories: Earth Science

Like a Moss

They’re pretty much everywhere.
In the harshest environments, even on highways some extremophile mosses, lichens and algae can survive. Most of them aren’t very welcome on the walls of our cities. Since they’re easier to remove than graffiti many house owners remove them first.

But did you know these, so called, cryptogamic covers are huge CO2 and Nitrogen storages?
Chemists, biologists and geologists worked together to find out recently that these plants store approximately 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide and fix approximately 50 million tons of nitrogen per year!

This order wasn’t expected at all and is about the number of carbon dioxide that is burned each year from forrests and other biomass.

Read more about the impact of moss on ScienceDaily: http://bit.ly/Kt5XAV

This article was originally published on The Earth Story – Facebook

Bio
Latest Posts

Jesper Dramsch

PhD Student at The Way of the Geophysicist

... is a geophysicist by heart. He works at the intersection of machine learning and geoscience. He is the founder of The Way of the Geophysicist and a deep learning enthusiast. Writing mostly about computational geoscience and interesting bits and pieces relevant to post-grad life.