In addition to stripping out the oxygen from shallow seas, these killer trees are spreading. They're contributing to that accelerated soil formation which is resulting in accelerated silicate weathering. This process removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and it creates calcium and magnesium carbonates. That actually stores two moles of carbon dioxide for every one mole of carbon dioxide released back in the carbon cycle through other processes.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the devastating mass extinctions of the Late Devonian Period, roughly 370 million years ago, when around 70 percent of species disappeared. Scientists are still trying to establish exactly what happened, when and why, but this was not as sudden as when an asteroid hits Earth. The Devonian Period had seen the first trees and soils and it had such a diversity of sea life that it’s known as the Age of Fishes, some of them massive and armoured, and, in one of the iconic stages in evolution, some of them moving onto land for the first time. One of the most important theories for the first stage of this extinction is that the new soils washed into oceans, leading to algal blooms that left the waters without oxygen and suffocated the marine life.
The image above is an abstract group of the huge, armoured Dunkleosteus fish, lost in the Late Devonian Extinction
With
Jessica Whiteside
Associate Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton
David Bond
Professor of Geology at the University of Hull
And
Mike Benton
Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Bristol.