Earth 'shook off' ancient warming | BBC

[Ediacara]

Earth 'shook off' ancient warming


The researchers studied mudrock
near Whitby in Yorkshire

UK scientists claim they now know how Earth recovered on its own from a sudden episode of severe global warming at the time of the dinosaurs.

Understanding what happened could help experts plan for the future impact of man-made global warming, experts say.

Rock erosion may have leached chemicals into the sea, where they combined with carbon dioxide, causing levels of the greenhouse gas to fall worldwide.

UK scientists report the details of their research in the journal Geology.

About 180 million years ago, temperatures on Earth rapidly shot up by about 5 Celsius.

More at the BBC

[proud patriot]

1. Man that's interesting

Thanks for posting this DinoBoy

[KoKo]

2. Ahhhhh........the "Greenspan Effect"......working even back then......

Let's hope old Mother Earth can pull it out once again.

[On the Road]

3. Yes, Eventually the Carbon Would Returned to the Atmosphere

as material in the seabed became sedimentary rock, settled, and was eventually brought to the surface by volcanoes. But that process takes millions of years.

There are some fascinating discussions of the carbon cycle in Scientific American's recent special edition "New Light on the Planets":

(1) How was life able to form on a young earth several billion years ago, when the sun was only 2/3 as strong as it is today? Answer: greenhouse gases trapped more heat, raising the temperature high enough to support life.

(2) Why is Venus so hot? Answer: Venus has a very dense atmosphere with a superabundance of heat-trapping gases -- mostly carbon dioxide, along with water vapor and sulfur dioxide. The surface temperature is 800 degrees hotter than it would be without global warming.

(3) Why is Mars so cold? Answer: Not so much because it's far away, but because it's too small to sustain the volcanic activity which could have pumped heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Just thought I'd share. I love this stuff.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. This is common

Major, brief fluctuations in temperature happen at about 1600-year intervals. When they happen in combination with other factors (which we are still uncertain about), an ice age may start -- or end.

Right now, the global warming we're experiencing is unusual. It's the greatest warm-up seen in anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 years, depending on which scientist you reference. The 180MYa warmup (and cooldown) was not much bigger, and may well have been smaller.

I don't think we can hold out much longer against an ice age. In this geological era, ice ages occur on a very well-synchronized pattern of 100,000 years on and 10,000 years off, and we're a little past 10,000 years since the Younger-Dryas era, the last glacial period's final hurrah. The heat-distributing ocean currents are breaking down, which means colder polar air (and ice age conditions) and warmer equatorial air (and increased droughts and desertification). The tragedy is that we have probably sped the natural process up by several hundreds of years -- when the ice returns, it will bring a catastrophe unparalelled in human history, unless we take aggressive action to help populations survive, which of course we won't.

--bkl