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Global change

Plankton cooled a greenhouse

Nature volume 407, pages 143–144 (2000)Cite this article

A Correction to this article was published on 28 September 2000

Scientists who can perform laboratory experiments are lucky — a megalomaniac climatologist can only dream of putting an Earth-like planet in a giant test tube, pumping billions of tonnes of CO2 into its atmosphere, and registering the effects on life and climate. Fortunately, there are other approaches. At the Palaeocene/Eocene (P/E) boundary 55 million years ago, nature appears to have done the greenhouse experiment for us. Bains et al.1 (page 171of this issue) now report that they have identified a rather unexpected response of the oceanic biosphere to dramatically high concentrations of atmospheric CO2, and temperatures, at this boundary — one that can account for a subsequent reduction in atmospheric CO2 and cooling.

In the early Palaeogene, 65 to 41 million years ago — a period that includes the Palaeocene and the first half of the Eocene — the Earth was generally much warmer than today. The polar regions were free of continental ice sheets, alligators and turtles thrived on Ellesmere Island at 75° N, and palm trees grew as far north as Kamchatka. For a period of about 60,000Footnote 1 years, ‘superwarm’ conditions developed at what is known as the P/E thermal maximum. Oxygen isotopic (18O/16O) analyses of shells from marine microorganisms called foraminifera show that surface-water temperatures off the coast of Antarctica rose from about 13 °C to 20 °C (ref. 2). Subtropical regions also became warmer; but the higher the latitude, the greater was the effect3,4. The warming coincides with some of the most dramatic biotic changes since the mass extinctions at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, 65 million years ago. Deep-sea, bottom-dwelling foraminifera suffered major extinctions, while terrestrial mammals and different oceanic plankton groups underwent considerable diversification.

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Figure 1: Events at the Palaeocene/Eocene (P/E) boundary, 55 million years ago, inferred from data from an ocean-sediment core drilled in the Weddell Sea, off Antarctica.

Notes

  1. * This item has been corrected: the period of 'superwarm' conditions at the Palaeocene/Eocene boundary should have been cited as lasting about 60,000 (not 150,000) years. Proof corrections made to the paper concerned (by S. Bains et al. 407, 171-174; 2000) were not passed on to the News & Views author.

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  1. Department of Earth Sciences University of Göteborg, Göteborg, SE-405 30, Sweden

    Birger Schmitz

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Schmitz, B. Plankton cooled a greenhouse. Nature 407, 143–144 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35025173

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