Major fall in CO2 levels dramatically cooled Earth’s climate 30 million years ago
The IndependentAround 34 million years ago, a huge transformation in the Earth’s climate driven by a decline in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, turned the climate from a “warm greenhouse” to a “cold icehouse”, new research has confirmed. But a new technique in which scientists from the University of Bristol examine molecular fossils preserved in ancient coal deposits, has helped reconstruct land temperatures across the transition period, which is thought to have occurred within a time frame of around six million years. “Those compounds can then be preserved for tens of millions of years, allowing us to reconstruct those ancient environmental conditions.” To reconstruct how the global average temperatures changed across the greenhouse to icehouse transition, the team applied their new approach to coal deposits from the southeast Australian Gippsland Basin. “These results provide further evidence that atmospheric CO2 plays a crucial role in driving Earth’s climate, including the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet,” they added.
History of this topic
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