Name: Trees Are Even More Crazy Than We Thought
Uploaded: 2026-01-07T17:22:34.000Z
Duration: 12 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Trees are the heaviest and largest living things on Earth, with the most massive tree weighing almost 2,000 tons, as much as 10 blue whales.

But instead of floating weightlessly in the Ocean, it reaches 25 stories into the sky, held in place by surprisingly shallow roots.

You'd think trees grow from the ground because, well, they're made of stuff and there's stuff in the ground.

But if something so massive and huge ate something down below, it would have to leave holes.

Instead, trees are growing by literally eating thin air.

But this is only half of the story, because down in the ground, roots are mining rocks in ways weirder than you can imagine.

How to eat air to grow huge Carbon is the most valuable material for living things.

A chemical multi tool you can make almost everything from, and

a good amount of it just floats around in the air and the oceans.

What makes plants so incredibly successful is that over a billion years ago, their ancestors became better than any other living thing at harvesting carbon.

Today, plants make up 80% of the biomass on Earth and are the basis for all complex life.

All animals eat either plants or animals that eat plants to get the carbon they need.

Trees are an especially ingenious way plants found to harvest massive amounts of carbon.

Trees are big and heavy, so they need a lot of material.

But the atmosphere is only about 0.04% CO2,425 CO2 molecules per million molecules in the air.

To get a single ton of carbon, the tree has to process 6,000 tons or 5 million cubic meters of air.

So trees developed sophisticated biological industrial megalopolises.

Their crowns a huge industrial park network made from dozens of branches, sub branches and hundreds of thousands of twigs that can sense the sun and shape the tree to grow towards it in slow motion.

The industrial parks where a tree eats and builds, consuming extreme amounts of resources from the air and fed by the roots down below, while vomiting waste and changing the climate around them.

It's made from hundreds of millions of factory cells and optimized to have as much surface area and be as thin as possible to harvest sunlight while your skin is Hundreds of cells thick, a leaf can be just 10 cells top to bottom.

On their top, leaves have only a single ultra thin layer of protective transparent skin cells that let light through and keep water in.

Below them are layers of factory cells filled to the brink with chloroplasts that do the actual work.

Beneath them, a spongy layer of loose cells enables gases to travel around.

The whole leaf is traversed by a network of vein like superhighways that carry sugars back down and bring water and minerals up from the roots.

At the bottom is another protective layer of cells interrupted by hundreds of thousands of stomata, tiny mouths opened and closed by two guard cells that look a bit like lips.

Each day, an adult tree pulls up dozens of liters of water all the way from its roots in the ground to these veins, where about 95% of it is sweated out through hundreds of billions of these tiny mouths.

This cools the leaf factories, which need to stay in direct sunlight as long as possible.

And the air around the tree, and it surrounds the tree with an invisible mist.

The vapor from a forest of billions of trees can seed clouds and create rain.

Without the trees, the Amazon would be a sad, dry shrubland or desert.

The other 5% of the water is used to keep the cells al and to power the factories where the magic happens.

We're not going to explain the details here, but

in a nutshell, with the energy from the sun, water molecules are split into hydrogen and oxygen.

The oxygen is ejected while the Leftover hydrogen and CO2 are forged and reduced into glucose, a simple sugar that's both battery and building block, and

For most animals, oxygen is not just garbage to the tree, though.

To actually use the energy stored in the glucose, the tree has to burn the sugar, just like we humans do with cellular respiration.

So all living cells in the tree suck in oxygen through the tiny leaf mouths, cracks in the bark, and

even root tips, tapping into tiny air pockets hidden in the soil.

This respiration runs non stop, and especially at night, when the leaf factories stop production.

Trees actually reabsorb some of the oxygen they produce.

And almost all of the rest gets used up by microbes and everything else breathing nearby.

Most of the world's free oxygen doesn't come from trees, but from algae and cyanobacteria in the oceans.

But this is only half of the story, because the even more insane parts of trees are the second invisible crown, the underground empire of the roots.

Most of the water A tree needs comes from rainfall, which soaks mainly into the upper layers of soil.

Annoyingly, for trees, their crowns are big umbrellas, so their roots need to spread out far and wide towards the side.

About 50% of their roots are packed into the top 25cm of soil.

They're not a mirror image of the crown, but a dense, tangled mat deeply intermingled with their neighbors.

Only if it's very dry do roots grow straight down to tap.

Hidden water reserves, in extreme cases, more than 20 storeys deep.

But roots have a far more complex job than just catching water.

Just like you can't build a city from only bricks and steel, trees also need some rare materials.

Phosphorus to build DNA, nitrogen for proteins and many more.

And all of these are stealthily buried underground.

Rocks, dry patches, nutrients and arrival routes are all scattered unpredictably and chaotically.

To navigate this shifting maze, roots evolved a specialized sensor at their very the root cap.

Each cap is filled with gravity sensing cells in which tiny, dense particles sink, like pebbles settling in a jar of water.

So the root always knows which way is down.

As it pushes forward, specialized cells detect moisture, temperature, chemical gradients and the smallest vibrations from water.

This raw data flows into the root's command center, just behind the tip, where cells produce electrical pulses and move transmitter chemicals around.

Signals from the soil are processed, interpreted and turned into decisions about where to grow.

A single tree has hundreds of thousands of these command centers, and

they seem to share information with each other.

Once a root has chosen a path, fuzzy little drinking straws called root hairs, loaded with enzymes and transport proteins, begin soaking up water and dissolved minerals.

But many essential nutrients are locked away in solid rock, so roots evolved to move into the finest cracks.

Once in, they fill with water and swell like tiny hydraulic jacks, creating enough pressure to break even the hardest rock.

Next, they release a mix of acids that seep into the fractures and dissolve the bonds that hold nutrients in place.

Claw like molecules, grab them and pull them in before they can slip away.

Even with all these tools, to really thrive, the tree needs allies.

The underground networks of fungi can stretch for kilometers.

They're so small that they can go where roots can't, slipping between grains of soil to reach distant pockets of nutrients.

So hundreds of millions of years ago, roots and fungi formed a trade alliance.

The trees provide a cut of the sugars they produce far up in the sky and fungi collect and give them nutrients and water in return.

Some fungi grow directly into the root cells, building tiny trade posts where sugars and minerals change hands.

Others wrap themselves around root tips, weaving between their outer layers, insulating delicate tissues and protecting them against microorganisms.

Today, there are thousands of fungal tree ally species, each with its own specialities.

Some only partner with specific tree species, while others are happy to work with almost anyone.

These connections often knit the roots of many trees together into vast underground networks.