Human carbon release rate is unprecedented in the past 66 million years
The earliest instrumental records of Earth’s climate, as measured by thermometers and other tools, start in the 1850s. To look further back in time, scientists investigate air bubbles trapped in ice cores, which expands the window to less than a million years. But to study Earth’s history over tens to hundreds of millions of years, researchers examine the chemical and biological signatures of deep sea sediment archives.
New research published on 21 March 2016 in Nature Geoscience by Richard Zeebe, professor of Oceanography, and colleagues looks at changes of Earth’s temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since the end of the age of the dinosaurs. Their findings suggest humans are releasing carbon about 10 times faster than during any event in the past 66 million years.
The research team developed a new approach and was able to determine the duration of the onset of an important past climate event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, PETM for short, 56 million years ago. “As far as we know, the PETM has the largest carbon release during the past 66 million years,” said Zeebe.
Read more about it in the UH System News, Reuters, the Washington Post, the BBC, National Geographic, the Guardian, and the National Science Foundation; read more about it and watch the video report at Hawaii News Now.