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Kick-starting ancient warming

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 156–159 (2009)Cite this article

Rapid global warming marked the boundary between the Palaeocene and Eocene periods 55.6 million years ago, but how the temperature rise was initiated remains elusive. A catastrophic release of greenhouse gases from the Kilda basin could have served as a trigger.

The warm period known as the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a period of climatic turmoil that lasted more than 100,000 years1. Ocean temperatures increased by 3–10 °C, and atmospheric concentrations of methane and carbon dioxide rose sharply1. Meanwhile, the oceans became more acidic and the carbon isotopic values of marine carbonates declined significantly, a sign of a disrupted carbon cycle. These latter observations suggest that several thousand gigatonnes of isotopically light carbon must have been injected into the atmosphere–ocean system over the course of the event1,2. Sources including the release of methane during the intrusion of magma into organic-rich sedimentary rocks, carbon dioxide outgassing from lava flows, and dissociation of methane gas hydrates in marine sediments2,3,4 have all been previously invoked in the perturbation — but we still do not know how much light carbon came from each source.

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Figure 1: The evolution of the Kilda basin.
Figure 2: The fate of Kilda's methane.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK

    E. G. Nisbet, G. Eagles & C. M. R. Fowler

  2. Department of Geology, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    S. M. Jones

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EQ, UK

    J. Maclennan

  4. Department of Chemistry, Centre for Atmosphere Science, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK

    J. Moed, N. Warwick, P. Braesicke & J. A. Pyle

  5. LATMOS-IPSL UPMC, B.102, Tour 45–46, 3ème étage 4, place Jussieu, Paris Cedex 05, 75252, France

    S. Bekki

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Correspondence to E. G. Nisbet or S. M. Jones.

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Nisbet, E., Jones, S., Maclennan, J. et al. Kick-starting ancient warming. Nature Geosci 2, 156–159 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo454

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