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Carbon cycle

The blast in the past

Nature volume 401, pages 752–755 (1999)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 18 November 1999

On current estimates1,2,3, over a period of less than a thousand years 2,000–4,000 gigatonnes of carbon will be added to the atmosphere by human activity. That's 2–4 billion billion tonnes. What will be the consequence of this rapid and massive release of carbon? The question has been tackled primarily with numerical simulations of the global carbon cycle constrained by experiments, present-day observations and records from the late Quaternary, the past 200,000 years or so of Earth history.

An alternative — studying ancient blasts of carbon — has always seemed pointless simply because we thought that there weren't any such blasts; as many of us know, natural processes cannot suddenly add enormous amounts of carbon to the ocean or atmosphere2. That view of the global carbon cycle is spectacularly flawed, however, as highlighted in the paper by Norris and Röhl on page 775 of this issue4.

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Figure 1: States of carbon around the late Palaeocene thermal maximum (LPTM), 55 million years ago.
Figure 2: Model of the exogenic carbon cycle that includes a large gas-hydrate capacitor.

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  1. the School of Earth Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, 4811, Queensland, Australia

    Gerald R. Dickens

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Correspondence to Gerald R. Dickens.

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Dickens, G. The blast in the past. Nature 401, 752–755 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44486

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