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A broken thermostat
Have you ever thought of taking a vacation to the sandy shores of the Arctic Ocean for sunbathing and swimming? About 55 million years ago, during a period called the “LatePaleocene Thermal Maximum” (LPTM), you would have enjoyed warm 73 degree Arctic Oceanwater temperatures. During this time, tropical regions were only modestly warmer thantoday, but tropical and subtropical conditions extended much farther toward the polar regionsthan today. This extreme warm spell lasted around 100,000 years, and was a high point in earth’scontinuous roller coaster of climate swings. It was followed by a slow, irregular worldwidecooling trend that has continued into the current cycles of long ice ages and much shorter interglacial warm periods. We have been in one of the interglacial warm periods for the past10,000 years.Several explanations for this LPTM event have been proposed. The most popular theoryis that major releases of methane progressively heated up the earth over a period of 1,000 years.Methane is a greenhouse gas that is from 20 to 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Normally, methane breaks down into carbon dioxide and water vapor over a few years, keepingatmospheric levels of methane very low. In contrast, vast resources of methane exist in thesediments underlying our oceans, along continental slopes, and in some deep basins, such as theGulf of Mexico, in the form of a waxy solid called “methane hydrate”. If methane hydrate iswarmed or experiences a decrease in water pressure, it releases much of its contained methane asgas. Several researchers have postulated that a major release of methane from these hydratestriggered the LPTM warming. They suggest that, if very large amounts of methane were releasedinto the atmosphere, the processes that normally remove the methane could have beenoverwhelmed, and it could have taken up to 100,000 years to reduce the methane back to normallevels. As alternative causes for the LPTM warming, others have suggested release of carbondioxide from major volcanic eruptions, releases of methane from large bogs in Britain, and froma combination of these and other sources.Once scientists discovered the LPTM event, researchers started looking for other abruptwarming events that may have been similar. Several similar events have now been proposed. Theearth appears to have experienced at least several of these very strong warming events, plus perhaps many more short-duration abrupt warming events. In the Cretaceous Period, from 145million to 65 million years ago in the age of dinosaurs, one particularly strong warming cycleapparently raised south polar ocean temperatures to as high as 90 degrees.Similarly, the earth has experienced strong cooling events, and recent research suggeststhat periods of strong global cooling with formation of glaciers also have been more commonthan previously thought, even in the middle of overall very warm periods during which polar regions grew forests instead of ice.If you’re sweating at the thought of 90-degree polar waters, a controversial theory couldcool you off. The theory, called “snowball earth,” proposes that the earth’s oceans have periodically frozen over completely between periods of thaw. These snowball earth episodes are postulated to have occurred from 750 to 580 million years ago. This theory gained popularityover the past decade based on review of certain geological records. This theory also instigateddetailed reviews of the geologic record to prove or disprove the idea. The new informationsuggests to many researchers that “snowball earth” should be renamed “slush ball earth.” Newinformation suggests that the oceans during this time never completely froze over, and that thesedeep freeze cycles were interrupted periodically by warm cycles.
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