Where Do Trees Come From?

About this video

Getting to the root of the problem.

Derek Muller of Veritasium gets to the bottom of how trees obtain their mass.

It might seem intuitive to think that the bulk of their weight comes from the soil, but an experiment conducted in the early 1600s demonstrated that this was not the case.

Instead trees obtain their mass from the carbon dioxide present in the air around us. Through the process of photosynthesis trees and plants capture energy from sunlight and use this to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds such as sugar. It is through this process that trees can produce their own food and subsequently add mass to themselves.