MikePole

January 3, 2020
/
comment 0

Limestones, Climate Change and Scepticism

What happens when a

seal swallows a lump of limestone?

***

The broad theme of my back-packing trip last year was to move around the northern rim of the Mediterranean (and visit a few of its is-
lands along the way). During much of that trip, limestone was in my face. I trekked over it in the Albanian Alps, trained through it in the
Austrian Alps, climbed it at Žabljak in Montenegro, and wandered over forest-covered limestone in the Balkans National Park and visited
archaeological sites built of it in Greece, Sardinia and Malta (the featured image is Dwejra Point on Malta). On other trips I’ve swum over
limestone on the Croatian coast, wandered over it in the United Arab Emirates and Iran, and I’ve worked on it in central Turkey. Limestone
gives so much character to that huge region, it could be named after it – ‘Limestonia’ or something. By and large, this huge extent of lime-
stone was formed in the shallow seas of an ocean that once extended from the Mediterranean through to the Middle East. It has been
called the Tethys, and the modern Mediterranean is essentially its much smaller progeny.
 Folded and faulted limestone near, Žabljak in northern Montenegro.

Limestone is the most visible part of the ‘long-term carbon cycle’. It’s the millions of years long process by which carbon flows through the
Earth’s atmosphere (mainly as Carbon Dioxide) and surface (as solids, such as limestone, and in dissolved forms). I thought of this after
coming across one of Tony Heller’s YouTube videos a few weeks ago. Heller has a thing about climate, and his blog by-line is “setting the
record straight about climate change”, and his video was called ‘Basic Science For Climate Scientists’. I’m a complete sceptic and always
keen to know that I’ve got ‘basic science’ right, – so, I thought I would check this video out.

As Heller tells his audience that “Climate modellers add nothing meaningful to science”, he shows two superimposed graphs, one of global
temperature going back 600 million years, and the other of carbon dioxide. His point is to show that there is no correlation between the
two. You can immediately ignore this argument, because there would only be a direct link between carbon dioxide levels and global tem-
perature if all else were equal. And over 600 million years, they weren’t.

It was the graphs themselves that caught my eye. The one purporting to show 600 million years of global temperature was only refer-
enced by a name (C.R. Scotese) but with no date. Long story short, the graph is an early attempt by Chris Scotese to estimate global tem-
perature. You can see his most up to date work here. Scotese will be perfectly aware that his global temperature estimates are just that –
and not (yet) appropriate for a comparison with CO2 levels.

But it was the second graph that was of more interest. It was credited to ‘R.A. Berner 2001’, but will actually be Berner and Kothavala
(2001). Let’s go back, not the 18 years to when that paper was produced (apparently the most recent paper someone “setting the record
straight” could find on the history of CO2 levels), but to 1983 when Berner and two colleagues produced a landmark scientific work. It was
the first attempt to figure out what past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were – basically from first principles. I remember coming
across the paper shortly later – and scoffing at it. I was incredulous about how the carbon dioxide levels of millions of years ago could be
worked out. Frankly, it went right over my head (in other words, I was too clueless to understand its significance). It took years before I had
the sense to read through it carefully (and work through what it was saying with an Excel spread-sheet).
 The limestone coast of Porto Conte, Sardinia.

Berner and his

colleagues understood the ‘long-term carbon cycle’. At the core
of this process, volcanoes expel carbon dioxide into the at-
mosphere,
rock weathering helps get this out of the atmosphere and transport it
(in a soluble form) to the sea, where creatures such as
shell fish
and corals turn it into limestone. Over long periods, geological
processes can then either shove the limestone onto land, or send
it
down a deep trench where it gets cooked, and then come back up as CO2
gas via volcanoes to compete the cycle. Berner and co had the
audacity to want to quantify all this.

They needed to get the numbers for each of the critical steps of this cycle, and they needed the amounts going in and out at each step, to
balance – for the present day Earth. They had to research things as esoteric as the average composition of the worlds river water and how
much water rivers actually discharge to the sea. If their numbers were badly out, the cycle would go out of kilter, with CO2 either running
out, or becoming outrageously high. But once they were satisfied they had the numbers balancing for the present – they could then start
exploring the past.
 Me, checking out limestone above Al Ain, United Arab Emirates.

The key piece of evidence they could use to see how the system responded back millions of years, was the rate of ocean floor spreading.
From the spacing of magnetic stripes on the sea floor, they knew this was higher in the Cretaceous. That implies that there was also more
volcanicity, and therefore more CO2 being erupted into the atmosphere. On top of that, because new sea floor is hot, it takes up more vol-
ume – and because there was more new sea floor in the Cretaceous, sea levels had to be higher, and consequently, global land area was
smaller. There was therefore less rock exposed to be weathered and to remove CO2 out of the atmosphere. Both of these processes acted
to increase levels of atmospheric CO2. However, they knew that “increased CO2 causes increased temperatures” (because of the
Greenhouse Effect) “which in turn cause increased weathering”. Based on chemistry, they could estimate how much faster rock weathered
in the warmer climates when there was more CO2.

In the end, Berner and colleagues calculated carbon dioxide levels going back 100 million years. A major conclusion was that carbon diox-
ide levels in the Cretaceous atmosphere were “distinctly higher than exists today” (or rather, that of when the paper was written). The in-
creased greenhouse effect was a good explanation as to why fossils were indicating that the Cretaceous was a warmer time.
 Limestone on either side of the gorge, Koman Lake, Albania.

Berner then followed

the success of that first model with a series of much more detailed
improvements. The 2001 version that Heller
cites in his video extends
back 600 million years, includes, for example, not only the amount of
land-surface weathering at different times,
but the relative amounts
of rock types (it makes a difference, whether say, volcanic basalt is
weathering, or granite). The publications put
out by Berner and
colleagues are a variety of model to understand how the Earth works
as a system. Yes, they are models. In fact, the first
three words of
the abstract of that 1983 paper are “A computer model”.

But, hang-on? So
Tony Heller’s video is using the results of a model (he calls it
“the actual science”) to point out how useless models are?

Yep.

And not only that, Heller is using a model, which explicitly factors in greenhouse science, where higher levels of carbon dioxide is the key
driver behind higher atmospheric temperatures – to argue that … carbon dioxide is basically irrelevant.

To date Heller’s video has received over 2,000 likes, with 1,677 people leaving comments, exclusively as far as I can tell, saying what an
amazing video it was. That sounds impressive. But not one of those hundreds of viewers has hauled Heller up over the very basic points of
why it’s OK to accept the results of a model to argue models are useless, or to use a model which incorporates basic greenhouse theory,
into an argument that the basic greenhouse theory is wrong.

That’s a lot of people who haven’t made the first step towards being sceptical – a basic background check on what’s being presented to
them. They should. But don’t haul me about it – haul up Heller.
 A road passes through the limestone landscape where I was working as a geologist, in Cappadocia, Turkey.

***

So where was I going

with that seal thing? Some time back in the 1980s, I was sitting in
the tea room of the Geology Department, Otago
University, in the
company of Rob Bearlin (who was doing his PhD on fossil whales).
Someone brought up the news that seals sometimes
swallowed rocks on
the sea floor, to help with their buoyancy. This triggered the daft
comment about what would happen if one of those
rocks was limestone.
Well, for the past thirty years I’ve carried this image of a rather
startled seal surfacing on the ocean, wide-eyed as it
lets out an
enormous belch, after mistakenly swallowing a lump of limestone. The
resulting eruption of carbon dioxide as the rock hit the
seals
digestive juices would have been dramatic.

Turns out, there is a geological analogy to that seal. In the geological world, most of the sea floor that gets transported down a deep ocean
trench, and much later (partly) comes back up through volcanoes, is sand and mud, and not too much limestone. However, consider what
happens when an entire coral reef, or similar sized chunk of limestone, gets swallowed? After it gets cooked deep below the surface, the
eventual volcanic belch of carbon dioxide would be phenomenal, and geologically rather rapid – and ought to be enough to markedly
warm the Earth. So has this ever happened? That question has been a magnet to those who are curious about the Earth system.

The nemeses of the ancient Tethys Ocean was mainly Africa (it also involves India). Over millions of years Africa rafted north, and finally
collided with Europe, sandwiching the Tethys in-between. In this collision, some of the limestone which had formed on the Tethys sea floor
was thrust up, where I could later see it. But other limestone would have been forced downward, cooked, and then come up volcanoes as
carbon dioxide. This topic is an active field of research right now (e.g. Hoareau et al, 2015) – but the flip-side of all that limestone that I’ve
seen, in a sense – the limestone that I didn’t see, is probably one reason why the climate of about 50 million years ago was much warmer
than today.

References

Berner, R.A., and Kothavalam, Z. 2001. GEOCARB III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time,. American Journal of
Science, 301:182–204.

Berner, R.A., Lasaga, A.C., and Garrels, R.M. 1983. The Carbonate-Silicate geochemical cycle and its effect on atmospheric carbon-dioxide
over the past 100 million years. American Journal of Science, 283:641-683.

Hoareau, G., Bomou, B., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., Carry, N., Marquer, D., Donnadieu, Y., Le Hir, G., Vrielynck, B., and Walter-Simonnet, A.-V.
2015. Did high Neo-Tethys subduction rates contribute to early Cenozoic warming? Climate of the Past, 11:1751-1767. <10.5194/cp-11-
1751-2015.

Share this:

 Twitter  Reddit  Facebook

Like this:

Loading...

Related

Really Old Mongolian Limestone When Corals Lived in the Mongolian Gobi The Marshall Paraconformity - a 30 year geologi-
August 29, 2014 August 10, 2017 cal debate in New Zealand
In "Mongolian Geology" In "Travel" July 22, 2014
In "New Zealand Geology"

Tweet

Like 25
 
Save

Filed under: Climate

Tagged: climate, Climate change

About the Author

Posted by mikepole.com

From New Zealand. Traveling the weyward path trying to figure out how the world works. I study fossil plants, past climates, travel, walk,
hike, read, take photos, struggle with computer graphics and plant trees.

« PREVIOUS POST NEXT POST »