Abstract
Once on a mountaineering trip to Mt Aspiring in a remote part of the South Island of New Zealand, we were lucky enough to have 10 consecutive days of sunny weather, during which we climbed most of the peaks around the Bonar Glacier. This was an unexpected bonus because we anticipated no more than two or three days of climbing weather on such a long trip in this rainy region of New Zealand. But the biggest surprise after so long among rock and ice was the intoxicating, fetid stench of alpine grassland as we descended from the glacier to French Ridge Hut.
Sod grasslands and hypergrazers coevolved about 19 million years ago to create a novel kind of soil, Mollisols. Geographic expansion of these productive and carbon-rich soils cooled global climate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Retallack, G.J. (2022). Grass that Changed the World. In: Soil Grown Tall. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88739-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88739-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-88738-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-88739-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)