India's smashing into Asia around 50 million years ago brought changes far beyond the creation of the world's highest mountain range: the continental collision is widely thought to have altered global climate.
Dennis Kent of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, and Giovanni Muttoni at the University of Milan in Italy offer particular mechanisms for this. The researchers' model predicts that the carbon-rich sediments on the former ocean floor stopped being subducted and producing carbon dioxide when the landmasses touched.
Meanwhile, India's drift into more humid equatorial climes increased the uptake of the greenhouse gas through greater weathering of silicates in the Deccan traps (pictured). This could have lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to prompt the cooling trend in the Middle to Late Eocene.
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Geosciences: Carbon crunch. Nature 455, 568 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/455568b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/455568b
