There are many questions that might seem simple but aren’t. For instance, where does the mass of trees come from?
Many people believe it comes from the soil. However, most of a tree’s mass comes from carbon… in the air.
This is one of those tidbits of information that if you know it, it’s not a big deal, but if you don’t, well then you likely either checked the date of this post to see if it was written on April Fools, or you did a Google search.
While it is interesting to dig into the science of this and learn about photosynthesis, and study the exchange of gasses, and what happens to carbon in the process, it’s also wonderful to marvel at the idea of what’s happening: Trees grow and get their size out of the air.
Here’s a quick video that explains it.
Here is another thought about trees. They won’t grow without the energy of the sun doing the work to convert the carbon from the air into the mass of the tree… so when you throw a log into a fire, you are converting energy captured by the sun back into heat energy.
From Wikipedia:
In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the principle that anything having mass has an equivalent amount of energy and vice versa, with these fundamental quantities directly relating to one another by Albert Einstein’s famous formula:
This is a big jump in thinking, but isn’t it interesting that so much of the mystery of life and our universe can be derived from the mass of a tree?
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* Update: See the first comment by Stephen Downes that points out my error in connecting the relationship to the mass-energy equivalent… I should have just left this post at the marvel of trees growing out of air!
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David, you might be interested in Colin Tudge’s book The Secret Life of Trees, as well as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Maria Popova has an interesting write-up.
I also enjoyed RN Future Tense’s exploration of the role played by trees in the fight against global warming.
Greetings Aaron,
I found this Radio Lab podcast mind blowing: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/from-tree-to-shining-tree
It shares how tress communicate with one another in a way that is reminiscent to the connection seen in the fictional movie Avatar. There is so much we still have to learn about the amazing world we live in!
The conversion of mass to energy is different in trees than in e=mc,2. In the case of trees, energy is stored not by creating new mass, but through the creation of chemical bonds, converting CO2 in the atmosphere (and water in the soil) into complex hydrocarbons. When the wood is burned, these bonds are broken, releasing heat (and carbon, in the form of plasma (flame) and gas (smoke). No mass is actually created or destroyed in either process. In an atomic bomb, by contrast, mass is actually converted directly into (a lot of) energy. The actual element changes, eg. Helium (heavier) becomes Hydrogen (lighter).
Thank you Stephen!
Thought I was making a logical jump from one to the other, but as you point out I made an error in that leap. I’ll update the post to point to your comment.
Thanks again!
Not a problem. The only way to learn is to leap.