Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by mrpg on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-knew-it dept.

Original URL: Volcanic carbon dioxide drove ancient global warming event

New research, led by the University of Southampton and involving a team of international scientists, suggests that an extreme global warming event 56 million years ago was driven by massive CO2 emissions from volcanoes, during the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean.

[...] The PETM [Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum] is the most rapid and extreme natural global warming event of the last 66 million years. It lasted for around 150 thousand years and global temperatures increased by at least 5°C - a temperature increase comparable with projections of modern climate beyond the end of this century. While it has long been suggested that the PETM event was caused by the injection of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere; the ultimate trigger, the source of this carbon, and the total amount released, have up to now all remained elusive.

[...] The team found that the PETM was associated with a total input of more than 10,000 petagrams of carbon from a predominantly volcanic source. This is a vast amount of carbon - some 30 times larger than all the fossil fuels burned to date and equivalent to all current conventional and unconventional fossil fuel reserves. In their computer model simulations, it resulted in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increasing from 800 parts per million to above 2000 ppm. The Earth's mantle contains more than enough carbon to explain this dramatic rise and it would have been released as magma, pouring from volcanic rifts at the Earth's surface.

Professor Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton said: "How the ancient Earth system responded to this carbon injection at the PETM can tell us a great deal about how it might respond in the future to man-made climate change. For instance, we found that Earth's warming at the PETM was about what we would expect given the CO2 emitted and what we know about the sensitivity of the climate system based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. However, compared with today's human-made carbon emissions, the rate of carbon addition during the PETM was much slower, by about a factor of 20."

Dr Philip Sexton from the Open University in Milton Keynes continues: "We found that carbon cycle feedbacks, like methane release from gas hydrates which were once the favoured explanation of the PETM, did not play a major role in driving the event. On the other hand, one unexpected result of our study was that enhanced organic matter burial was important in ultimately drawing down the released carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean and thereby accelerating the recovery of the Earth system. This shows the real value of studying these ancient warming events as they provide really valuable insights into how Earth behaves when its climate system and carbon cycle are dramatically perturbed."


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday September 04 2017, @09:27AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 04 2017, @09:27AM (#563373) Journal

    Voluntary wealth redistribution???

    The word payment is a lot shorter.

    But not as accurate.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   0  
       Disagree=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Disagree' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1