Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel Bomb here. You might have a gingko tree
Speaker 1: in your neighborhood. It has whispy, fan shaped leaves that
Speaker 1: turn a beautiful burnished yellow in the fall, and possibly
Speaker 1: drops rotten smelling fruit. It looks different from other trees
Speaker 1: you might see on your street, mostly because when you
Speaker 1: look at a ginko tree, you're looking at the product
Speaker 1: of another time. Gingko baloba is the oldest tree on Earth.
Speaker 1: It's outlived all its relatives and has seen the dinosaurs
Speaker 1: rise and fall. Any individual gingko tree may have seen
Speaker 1: a lot. The oldest known gingo specimen stands in the
Speaker 1: Zogan Mountains of China and has one thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: years old. Ginko trees have remained pretty much unchanged for
Speaker 1: the past two hundred and seventy million years, have survived
Speaker 1: three mass extinctions, and might be a key to helping
Speaker 1: us understand something about how our current climate shifts will
Speaker 1: affect organisms in the future. A group of researchers at
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, are studying
Speaker 1: a grove of fifteen ginko trees each housed in a
Speaker 1: plastic greenhouse tent and hooked up to a tank of
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide that delivers different amounts of the gas to
Speaker 1: each tree, some up to two and a half times
Speaker 1: the carbon dioxide concentration of modern Earth's air. In this experiment,
Speaker 1: called fossil atmospheres, the scientists are trying to reconstruct how
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of Earth has changed over the past couple
Speaker 1: of geologic eras, through the ice ages and periods when
Speaker 1: there was no ice at all in the poles, and
Speaker 1: how it's likely to change in the future. The Earth's
Speaker 1: atmosphere is made up of a variety of different gases,
Speaker 1: including carbon dioxide, the concentrations of which have a huge
Speaker 1: impact on the planet's climate. Scientists can get a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea of what past climates were like by looking
Speaker 1: at fossil plants, thanks to a little structure on the
Speaker 1: surface of their leaves called stamata. These are tiny holes
Speaker 1: that let carbon dioxide into the leaf and water and
Speaker 1: oxygen out. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the air
Speaker 1: determines how many somata are on the surface of the leaf.
Speaker 1: Using fossils of ginkos from different places and time periods
Speaker 1: can help the researchers put together a story of what
Speaker 1: Earth's climate has been up to for the past few
Speaker 1: hundred million years. The researchers are doing all kinds of
Speaker 1: experiments with their tented fossil atmospheres, but they also want
Speaker 1: your help. You can assist in this project by volunteering
Speaker 1: to help count stamata on fossil gingko leaves in order
Speaker 1: to calculate the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: during specific periods in the deep Deep past. You can
Speaker 1: also send in ginko leaves from wherever you live, because
Speaker 1: although ginkos are native to China, they're popular in yards, gardens,
Speaker 1: and along streets worldwide. By receiving specimens from citizen scientists
Speaker 1: all over the globe, the researchers will be able to
Speaker 1: get a better sense of how various features of the
Speaker 1: trees differed depending on whether they're planted in say, Singapore
Speaker 1: or Colorado, which will in turn help them to better
Speaker 1: understand how ginko grow differently depending on the climate in
Speaker 1: which they developed now or two million years ago. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clay.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radios How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: long lived topics, visit our home planet has Stuffworks dot
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