Why aren't plants black? 🌿

Why are plants green? Is there a reason plants evolved to be green, globally? What does it have to do with the color of the sunlight coming down through our atmosphere?

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Creator: Dianna Cowern
Editor: Jabril Ashe
Hamburger eater: Jabril Ashe
Colorful Planet Artist: Ashley Warner

Thanks to: Dan Walsh, Kyle Kitzmiller, Joe Hanson and Kyle Norby

Sources:

Black Nigrescens Plant:
http://www.thedangergarden.com/2013/0... With permission from Loree Bohl,
thedangergarden.com
Green Nigrescens Plant:
With permission from © Davis Landscape Architecture, London, UK http://www.davisla.com

Solar spectrum adapted from:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

Chlorophyll spectrum adapted from:
http://www.austincc.edu/biocr/1406/la...

The Functional Significance of Black-Pigmented Leaves: Photosynthesis, Photoprotection and Productivity in Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
Functional evolution of photochemical energy
transformations in oxygen-producing organisms
http://www.publish.csiro.au/FP/pdf/FP...

Evolutionary Competition Between Primitive Photosynthetic Systems: Existence of an early purple Earth?
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AAS...

A Compilation of Selected Data on Solar Radiation at Sea Level
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/...

Green Light Drives CO2 Fixation Deep Within Leaves
http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content...

Green Light Drives Leaf Photosynthesis More Efficiently than Red Light in Strong White Light: Revisiting the Enigmatic Question of Why Leaves are Green

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/content...

http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/green_li...
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/...

The sensitivity of the human eye to different colors
https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Li...

Music: APM

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