Trees can be monstrous. A redwood tree can grow to be over 360 feet (110 meters) tall and over 30 feet (9 meters) in diameter.  🤯

How do trees get so big? From where do they get all of their mass? 🧐

It might be tempting to say the soil is where they get mass. After all, trees need nutrients from the soil to grow. But this isn’t the case.

Trees actually get nearly all of their mass from carbon. In a sense, trees inhale carbon dioxide, which is then mixed with water and transformed by photosynthesis into carbohydrates for the tree and oxygen for the air. 🌳🌬

This process leads to trees being great carbon storage systems. Depending on the age of the tree, trees can absorb up to 40 metric tons of CO2 per hectare per year. One hectare of redwood trees, as reported in this Yale magazine, can store a total of 2,600 metric tons of carbon. 😯

To put this in perspective, 2,600 metric tons is more than the amount of carbon to fly a full Boeing 747 around the circumference of the earth, plus an extra two trips across the continental US. Now imagine a whole forest’s worth of carbon sequestered. 🙏🌲

Now that’s a LOT of carbon.

So now you might see why Treecard is so focused on planting trees… 🤗🌎

To find out how much carbon the largest tree in the world (by volume) has captured, check out our Instagram post on General Sherman

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