Cindy Looy

Biography

Cindy Looy is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology and Herbarium. She is interested in the response of Paleozoic plants and plant communities to environmental changes during periods of mass extinction and deglaciation, and their consequences for the evolution of species. Her research focuses on the consequences of the biotic crisis at the end of the Permian in the continental domain. She is also interested in the transition from an ice-dominated to an ice-free world from the Upper Carboniferous to the Middle Permian.

Conference: Do plants have an impact on the planet?

From the fossil record, we now know that plants settled on land less than 500 million years ago and gradually colonized the surface. On the one hand, they made other forms of life on Earth possible; on the other, they had a profound impact beyond the earth’s surface. Plants have modified river systems, increased the physical and chemical erosion of rocks and trapped sediments. Through photosynthesis, plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, producing organic carbon and releasing O2. Over time, more and more carbon is stored in biomass and soils, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. How have these changes affected our planet’s climate? And when was the first evidence of natural fires, a phenomenon that seems very common today but didn’t exist before plants began to cover the continents?