Biomass: The Earth's Big Weight!

Biomass is like a giant scale weighing all the living stuff in one place, like a forest or even the whole planet! It includes tiny bugs, tall trees, and even you! Scientists measure it to see how much life is around. Sometimes they weigh things wet, like a fish fresh from the water, and sometimes they dry it out to get just the plant or animal part.

Guess who makes up most of the Earth's biomass? It's plants! They are like the super-heavyweights of life. All the animals, from tiny ants to giant whales, weigh much less together than all the plants. Even though bacteria are super important, they don't weigh as much as scientists once thought.

Scientists figured out that all the living things on Earth weigh about 550 billion tonnes of carbon. That's like a million, million, million elephants! Most of that weight comes from plants. Every year, plants make over 100 billion tonnes of new stuff, which is called production. It's like the Earth is always growing!

Did you know that by the year 2020, humans had made more stuff than all living things weigh? Things like buildings, roads, and toys are called human-made mass. It's amazing how much we build! This shows how much humans are changing the planet, even more than all the living creatures combined.