Burning of forest materials under late Paleozoic high atmospheric oxygen levels

Wildman, Richard A.; Hickey, Leo; Dickinson, Matthew B.; Berner, Robert A.; Robinson, Jennifer M.; Dietrich, Michael; Essenhigh, Robert H.; Wildman, Craig B.

doi:10.1130/g20255.1

Cited by 116 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…However, although a high O 2 atmosphere may have increased the probability of ignition of a fuel source (Watson et al 1978), there is no evidence that it enhanced the spread of fire (Wildman et al 2004). Indeed, Wildman et al (2004) reported from their thermochemistry and flame-spread experiments that, with moisture contents typical of forest floor fuel sources, there was no sustained burning in an atmosphere of between 21 and 35% O 2 .…”

Section: Are C 4 Plants Ten-times Older Than We Think?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants

Osborne

Beerling

2005

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

224

151

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Plants with the C 4 photosynthetic pathway dominate today's tropical savannahs and grasslands, and account for some 30% of global terrestrial carbon fixation. Their success stems from a physiological CO 2 -concentrating pump, which leads to high photosynthetic efficiency in warm climates and low atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. Remarkably, their dominance of tropical environments was achieved in only the past 10 million years (Myr), less than 3% of the time that terrestrial plants have existed on Earth. We critically review the proposal that declining atmospheric CO 2 triggered this tropical revolution via its effects on the photosynthetic efficiency of leaves. Our synthesis of the latest geological evidence from South Asia and North America suggests that this emphasis is misplaced. Instead, we find important roles for regional climate change and fire in South Asia, but no obvious environmental trigger for C 4 success in North America. CO 2 -starvation is implicated in the origins of C 4 plants 25-32 Myr ago, raising the possibility that the pathway evolved under more extreme atmospheric conditions experienced 10 times earlier. However, our geochemical analyses provide no evidence of the C 4 mechanism at this time, although possible ancestral components of the C 4 pathway are identified in ancient plant lineages. We suggest that future research must redress the substantial imbalance between experimental investigations and analyses of the geological record.

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Section: Are C 4 Plants Ten-times Older Than We Think?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants

Osborne

Beerling

2005

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

224

151

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“…Achernar preserves a distal floodplain or lake-margin setting (Cúneo et al 1993;Gulbranson et al 2012), thus erosion may have had an impact on the structure and composition of these forests. Fire probably played a significant role in the highoxygen atmosphere of the late Palaeozoic (Glasspool 2000;Wildman et al 2004;Uhl et al 2008); however, we lack information on these forests that would allow us to understand how much of an impact fire had on controlling ecosystem dynamics. Disturbance processes are important for creating gaps in forest canopy cover, which can be exploited by the establishment of new taxa, such as the poleward migration of modern temperate forest trees into the boreal forests (Leithead et al 2010).…”

Section: Ecological Variation On a Palaeolandscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Leaf habit of Late PermianGlossopteristrees from high-palaeolatitude forests

Gulbranson

Ryberg

Decombeix

et al. 2014

JGS

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Abstract:The leaf longevity of trees, deciduous or evergreen, plays an important role in climate feedbacks and plant ecology. in modern forests of the high latitudes, evergreen trees dominate; however, the fossil record indicates that deciduous vegetation dominated during some previous warm intervals. We show, through an integration of palaeobotanical techniques and isotope geochemistry of trees in one of the earliest polar forests (Late Permian, c. 260 Ma, Antarctica), that the arborescent glossopterid taxa were both deciduous and evergreen, with a greater abundance of evergreen trees occurring in the studied forests. These new findings suggest the possibility that deciduousness was a plastic trait in ancient polar plants, and that deciduous plants, migrating poleward from lower latitudes, were probably better adapted to high-disturbance areas in environments that were light-limited.

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“…Increasing the oxygen concentration (X O 2 , percentage by volume) above the present-day level of 21%, the ignition probability of vegetation on land increases (Lovelock and Lodge, 1972;Lenton and Watson, 2000). The influence of atmospheric oxygen on the flammability of Earth ecosystems has been investigated in Wildman et al (2004); Belcher and McElwain (2008) ;Belcher et al (2010); Watson and Lovelock (2013). Most of these studies considered flaming wildfires, and their results suggested that below a critical oxygen concentration (X * O 2 ) between 12 to 16%, fire activity is not possible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, understanding the dependence of smouldering wildfires with atmospheric oxygen is crucial to estimate the fire threshold on Earth's vegetation throughout geological times. In the literature (Watson and Lovelock, 2013;Wildman et al, 2004;Belcher and McElwain, 2008), two critical oxygen values have been studied for flaming fires: (1) critical oxygen for ignition, below which fire cannot be initiated by any ignition source, and (2) critical oxygen for fire spread (or extinction), below which an existing fire cannot be sustained or extinction occurs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactions of Earth's atmospheric oxygen and fuel moisture in smouldering wildfires

Huang

Rein

2016

Science of The Total Environment

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Vegetation, wildfire and atmospheric oxygen on Earth have changed throughout geological times, and are dependent on each other, determining the evolution of ecosystems, the carbon cycle, and the climate, as found in the fossil record. Previous work in the literature has only studied flaming wildfires, but smouldering is the most persistent type of fire phenomena, consuming large amounts of biomass. In this study, the dependence of smouldering fires in peatlands, the largest wildfires on Earth, with atmospheric oxygen is investigated. A physics-based computational model of reactive porous media is developed which was previously validated against experiments. Simulations are conducted for wide ranges of atmospheric oxygen concentrations and fuel moisture contents to find thresholds for ignition and extinction. Results show that the predicted rate of spread increases in oxygen-rich atmospheres, while it decreases over wetter fuels. A novel nonlinear relationship between critical oxygen and critical moisture is found. More importantly, we show that compared to previous work on flaming fires, smouldering fires can be ignited and sustained at a substantially higher moisture content (> 100%), and at a substantially lower oxygen concentration (∼ 12%). This defines a possible lower oxygen threshold for wildfire and could help interpret the char remains and paleo fire activities seen in the fossil record.

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Burning of forest materials under late Paleozoic high atmospheric oxygen levels

Cited by 116 publications

References 21 publications

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants

Leaf habit of Late PermianGlossopteristrees from high-palaeolatitude forests

Interactions of Earth's atmospheric oxygen and fuel moisture in smouldering wildfires

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Burning of forest materials under late Paleozoic high atmospheric oxygen levels

Cited by 116 publications

References 21 publications

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C4plants

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C4plants

Leaf habit of Late PermianGlossopteristrees from high-palaeolatitude forests

Interactions of Earth's atmospheric oxygen and fuel moisture in smouldering wildfires

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Product

Resources

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Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants

Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C₄plants