First plants cooled the Ordovician

01 February 2012

Nature Geoscience

Nature Geoscience 5,86–89(2012) doi:10.1038/ngeo1390 Timothy M. Lenton, Michael Crouch,Martin Johnson, Nuno Pires & Liam Dolan

View Journal Article / Working Paper

The Late Ordovician period, ending 444 million years ago, was marked by the onset of glaciations. The expansion of non-vascular land plants accelerated chemical weathering and may have drawn down enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to trigger the growth of ice sheets.