New finding shows climate change can happen in a geological instant
New finding shows climate change can happen in a geological instant
(Phys.org) —"Rapid" and "instantaneous" are words geologists don't use very often. But Rutgers geologists use these exact terms to describe a climate shift that occurred 55 million years ago.
In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Morgan Schaller and James Wright contend that following a doubling in carbon dioxide levels, the surface of the ocean turned acidic over a period of weeks or months and global temperatures rose by 5 degrees centigrade – all in the space of about 13 years.
"We've shown unequivocally what happens when CO2 increases dramatically – as it is now, and as it did 55 million years ago," Wright said. "The oceans become acidic and the world warms up dramatically. Our current carbon release has been going on for about 150 years, and because the rate is relatively slow, about half the CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans and forests, causing some popular confusion about the warming effects of CO2. But 55 million years ago, a much larger amount of carbon was all released nearly instantaneously, so the effects are much clearer."
"Scientists have been using this event from 55 million years ago to build models about what's going on now," Schaller said. "But they've been assuming it took something like 10,000 years to release that carbon, which we've shown is not the case. We now have a very precise record through the carbon release that can be used to fix those models."
Oops! So geological processes aren't necessarily gradual events after all. So it goes...
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