If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.

This is why the question is interesting. You can't just suck water to the top of a 60 meter tree. There must be some kind of positive-pressure pumping involved.

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pulvinar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The trick for trees is capillaries, which change the equation. The 10 meter limit only applies to larger columns. With capillaries there's a high negative tension that allows evaporation from leaves to pull the xylem sap up 100 meters or more.

There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop it.

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hinkley an hour ago | parent | next [-]

One of the things Susan Simard proved was that deep rooted trees that had found subterranean water continue pulling that water at full speed at night when transpiration is low, and that water finds its way into the fungal networks in the soil and into nearby plants.

Simard attributes intention to this, but osmosis is “fair”. It seeks to move water to where sugars are and sugars to where water is. So a plant giving up sugars will receive water, and one low on water will give up sugars in the process of equalization.

Do fungi contain pumps to maintain disequilibrium in this work? I could not say. But even when they first learned the trick of tapping roots the basic premise would have worked in a rudimentary fashion woth no further optimization.

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tenuousemphasis an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input

... that would be the least of the tree's problems.

	▲	eleventen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"If the tree were in the vacuum of interstellar space..."

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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