WTF is Photosynthesis? 🌱

Morning Plant People!

Humans like me and you get our energy from stuffing our face with food.

This energy comes in the form of a sugar called glucose.

Plants also need glucose to survive.

But they simply make their own.

From THE POWER OF THE SUN!

Through a process called:

This also pumps out free, delicious oxygen for you and me to breathe.

So, without this complicated sounding, magical process, we’d all be dead…

Okay so, wtf is this thing?

Let's go step by step through the process.

Sunlight travels from the sun…

Onto the earth…

Through the leaf of a plant…

And into a plant cell.

In plant cells, there are 10 to 20 of these little blob things called chloroplasts.

And inside these are a bunch of molecules called chlorophyll, which capture the sunlight.

But for some reason it does a terrible job at absorbing specifically the green wavelength of light.

So green just bounces right off plants.

Which is why we see most plants as green.

Anyway, the chlorophyll absorbs the sunlight, and while this happens, water (H₂O) is sucked up by the roots of the plant and taken up into the leaves.

Plants also “breathe in” carbon dioxide (CO₂) through tiny openings in their leaves called stomata.

Now the energy from the sunlight starts by breaking down the CO₂ into C and O₂

Or Carbon and 2 Oxygen.

This Oxygen then gets released into the atmosphere, and that is how we breathe.

Then finally, the sunlight powers a complex chemical process that combines 6 of these individual carbon atoms and 6 water molecules together to create this:

The sugar, glucose.

And there you have it, homemade energy.

All powered by the sun.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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