Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here. You might have a gingko tree in your neighborhood. It has whispy, fan shaped leaves that turn a beautiful burnished yellow in the fall, and possibly drops rotten smelling fruit. It looks different from other trees you might see on your street, mostly because when you look at a ginko tree, you're looking at the product of another time. Gingko baloba is the oldest tree on Earth.
It's outlived all its relatives and has seen the dinosaurs rise and fall. Any individual gingko tree may have seen a lot. The oldest known gingo specimen stands in the Zogan Mountains of China and has one thousand, four hundred years old. Ginko trees have remained pretty much unchanged for the past two hundred and seventy million years, have survived three mass extinctions, and might be a key to helping us understand something about how our current climate shifts will
affect organisms in the future. A group of researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, are studying a grove of fifteen ginko trees each housed in a plastic greenhouse tent and hooked up to a tank of carbon dioxide that delivers different amounts of the gas to each tree, some up to two and a half times
the carbon dioxide concentration of modern Earth's air. In this experiment, called fossil atmospheres, the scientists are trying to reconstruct how the atmosphere of Earth has changed over the past couple of geologic eras, through the ice ages and periods when there was no ice at all in the poles, and how it's likely to change in the future. The Earth's atmosphere is made up of a variety of different gases, including carbon dioxide, the concentrations of which have a huge
impact on the planet's climate. Scientists can get a pretty good idea of what past climates were like by looking at fossil plants, thanks to a little structure on the surface of their leaves called stamata. These are tiny holes that let carbon dioxide into the leaf and water and oxygen out. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air determines how many somata are on the surface of the leaf.
Using fossils of ginkos from different places and time periods can help the researchers put together a story of what Earth's climate has been up to for the past few hundred million years. The researchers are doing all kinds of experiments with their tented fossil atmospheres, but they also want your help. You can assist in this project by volunteering to help count stamata on fossil gingko leaves in order to calculate the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
during specific periods in the deep Deep past. You can also send in ginko leaves from wherever you live, because although ginkos are native to China, they're popular in yards, gardens,
and along streets worldwide. By receiving specimens from citizen scientists all over the globe, the researchers will be able to get a better sense of how various features of the trees differed depending on whether they're planted in say, Singapore or Colorado, which will in turn help them to better understand how ginko grow differently depending on the climate in which they developed now or two million years ago. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clay.
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