Flower power makes tropics cooler, wetter
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 - 13:00
in Biology & Nature
The world is a cooler, wetter place because of flowering plants, according to new climate simulation results published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The effect is especially pronounced in the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non-flowering varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by ever-wet rainforest.