PHOTOSYNTHESIS

Photosynthesis is important to you. It keeps you, everybody, and everything else alive. You'll never look at plants or slime the same. You won't want to interrupt the grass by stepping on it. Don't bother the diatoms. They're busy. Photosynthesis in progress!Energy pours onto the earth in the form of electromagnetic radiation that most of us call sunshine. The sun's energy heats the earth, makes weather, keeps us warm - thanks a lot. But if that was all, this would still be a pretty dead planet, and there would be no me and no you. Plants and animals need energy to live, to grow, and to make more of themselves. All that solar energy pouring onto the earth everyday wouldn't do us any good if we didn't have some way to turn it into a form of energy that we can use. Autitrophic life forms have "stepped-up" to save the day. They've developed a way to take sunshine, and a few common molecules from air and water, and turn them into something that the rest of us "non-autotrophs" can use. Everyday, without fanfare or thanks, or anyone hardly noticing, these humble life forms make thousands of tons of glucose (and other carbohydrates) and put thousands of tons of oxygen into the atmosphere. Without all that oxygen and carbohydrates we animals would be in big trouble.Photosynthesis is the beginning of the amazing journey of energy and the basic materials of life from plant to animal to animal to decomposer. For the molecules and atoms that living things are made of, the journey is a cycle that repeats itself over and over. You might be made of a few carbon or oxygen atoms that were once part of a dinosaur or a wooly mammoth. For energy, the trip is sort of a one time thing - in and out. All the energy that moves through life eventually ends up as heat and radiates back into space - from whence it came. If it wasn't for that nice big dose of new energy coming in from the sun every day, we would all soon be very cold and in a permanent frozen state of "not-living".