The tiny fern that could take a big bite out of greenhouse gases

This great Azolla boom was so successful that it lasted for 800,000 years, and is now known to paleobotanists as the Azolla event. Green plants suck up carbon dioxide; Azolla is particularly good at doing so. Over that period, researchers believe it sequestered about 10 trillion tons of carbon dioxide from the Earths atmosphere, or well over 200 times the total amount of carbon dioxide humans currently release into the atmosphere every year.

During the Azolla boom, global temperatures plummeted, suggesting the diminutive fern played a key role in transitioning Earth from a hot house to the cool place it is today, Fay-Wei Li, a plant evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, said in a press release. As Yales E360 pointed out, scientists have wondered for years if Azolla could be harnessed to cool the planet again.

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This teeny tiny fern may hold a key to lowering global temperatures (Quartz)