Ancient air challenges prominent explanation for a shift in glacial cycles

Wolff, Eric W.

doi:10.1038/d41586-019-03199-8

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30 October 2019

Ancient air challenges prominent explanation for a shift in glacial cycles

An analysis of air up to 2 million years old, trapped in Antarctic ice, shows that a major shift in the periodicity of glacial cycles was probably not caused by a long-term decline in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

Eric W. Wolff⁰

Eric W. Wolff
1. Eric W. Wolff is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK.
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During the past 2.6 million years, Earth’s climate has alternated between warm periods known as interglacials, when conditions were similar to those of today, and cold glacials, when ice sheets spread across North America and northern Europe. Before about 1 million years ago, the warm periods recurred every 40,000 years, but after that, the return period lengthened to an average of about 100,000 years. It has often been suggested that a decline in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was responsible for this fundamental change. Writing in Nature, Yan et al.¹ report the first direct measurements of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations from more than 1 million years ago. Their data show that, although CO₂ levels during glacials stayed well above the lows that occurred during the deep glacials of the past 800,000 years, the maximum CO₂ concentrations during interglacials did not decline. The explanation for the change must therefore lie elsewhere.

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Nature 574, 636-637 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03199-8

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