Every year, plants, bacteria, and algae earth-wide make

around 150 billion metric tons of food for themselves

and almost every other living thing on earth. How do
they do it? Photosynthesis. In plants, this astonishingly
intricate process takes place in a highly organized
structure called a chloroplast, where a green pigment,
chlorophyll, and other pigments collect and use the
energy from visible light with amazing efficiency. In
photosynthesis, this energy is used to do something that
happens nowhere else in the natural world, split water
into hydrogen ions and oxygen molecules.
Hydrogen ions combine with carbon dioxide to make
sugar, which can be used by plants to make all the other
complex molecules that they need to grow. Most of the
oxygen is expelled as an unused by-product, one that we
can't move without. About half of the oxygen we and
other organisms breathe comes from phytoplankton,
microscopic organisms that drift in the ocean. And the
smallest one yet discovered, a cyanobacterium, is also
the most abundant. Though invisible to the naked eye,
these bacteria alone produce around one fifth of the
oxygen on earth. Nearly all living things need oxygen,
and they depend on other life forms to make it. The
amazingly complex process of combining carbon dioxide
with the water that constantly cycles on our planet and
energy from the sun gives us every bite of food and
every breath of air we need.