🌅 When Earth’s Vegetative Biosphere Will End

SOURCE

Haqq-Misra & Wolf (2026)

WHAT TO KNOW

• A new study by researchers at Blue Marble Space suggests plant life on Earth can survive for another 1.8 billion years, after which atmospheric carbon dioxide may be too low for plants to photosynthesize, causing the collapse of the planet’s vegetative biosphere. The timeline pushes back previous estimates by roughly 500 million years, suggesting the Earth’s biosphere is more resilient to environmental changes than previously believed.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Nearly all life on Earth depends on photosynthesis—the process used by plants to turn sunlight into energy—including humans, whose diets rely on the plants we eat and feed to livestock. However, at certain temperatures, plants’ photosynthetic cycle shuts down as the planet warms and draws CO2 out of the atmosphere and into carbonate rocks. By accounting for various climate scenarios and plants that can photosynthesize under low-CO2 conditions, the researchers of the present study found most land plants will cross life-threatening climate thresholds around 1.68 billion years from now, with the maximum lifetime of the Earth’s vegetative biosphere projected at roughly 1.86 billion years.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Beyond plant life, astronomers have long assumed the Earth will ultimately cease to exist in about 5 billion years, when the Sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the planet. However, new research by astronomers at KU Leuven in Belgium found the Earth could survive the Sun’s expansion. Without getting lost in the weeds, the team found that as the Sun expands, it will also lose mass as its puffed-up outer layers are shed by solar wind. If the mass loss is great enough, the Earth may escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and move to a wider orbit, rather than becoming engulfed.