Could vegetation potentially regrow on vitrified ground?

In this world, a planet with very dense vegetation (earth-tropical-forest-like) and silica containing soil was attacked by spaceships which fired very high energy laser beams across the planet's entire surface, effectively vitrifying it.

• this planet's outer crust was only soil not solid rock or water, life developed thanks to underground water pockets (10 to 50 meters deep)
• the first 8 to 15 meters of soil (depending on location) were fused into glass
• all vegetation in this depth range was immediately incinerated
• some of the plants used to reach down to 20 or 30 meters underground, and a lot of very resilient seeds were disseminated at these levels as well as volatile seeds in the atmosphere
• all of those plants need sunlight and oxygen to develop, but seeds can stay in cryptobiotic-like stasis for as long as thousands of years

question: Could vegetation plausibly break the surface and grow again, after 1300 years time?

posted about 7 years ago

System‭

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