Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Palaeoclimate

Enigmatic Earth

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 537–538 (2009)Cite this article

Global warming 55 million years ago was accompanied by a massive injection of carbon into the ocean-atmosphere system, but the resulting climatic warming was much greater than expected from the modelled rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide alone.

The rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activities has rendered Earth's climatic future highly uncertain. Coupled ocean–atmosphere models provide one set of tools for addressing this uncertainty, but validating future climatic projections is problematic. An alternative way of gauging future climate change involves investigating Earth's climate history over the Cenozoic era, which spans the past 64 million years; this provides a unique understanding of how the climate system has responded to past changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations1. One particularly relevant episode is the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), over 55 million years ago2, when large volumes of carbon were injected into the ocean–atmosphere system, and temperatures rose by 5–9 °C. On page 576 of this issue Zeebe and colleagues use a carbon cycle model, constrained with carbonate-dissolution and stable-isotope records from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to show that calculated increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, resulting from the carbon injection during the PETM, explain less than half of the temperature increase3.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Figure 1: Satellite image of the Earth, highlighting the amount of thermal energy (long-wave radiation) emitted back to space.

References

  1. Hansen, J. et al. Open Atmos. Sci. J. 2, 217–231 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bowen, G. J. et al. Eos 87, 165–169 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Zeebe, R. E. et al. Nature Geosci. 2, 576–580 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Zachos, J. C. et al. Science 308, 1611–1615 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Dickens, G. R. et al. Paleoceanography 10, 965–971 (1995).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Sloan, L. C. et al. Nature 357, 320–322 (1992).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Pancost, R. D. et al. Nature 449, 332–335 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Zimov, S. A., Schuur, E. A. & Chapin, F. S. Science 312, 1612–1613 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Bowen, G. J. et al. Nature 432, 495–499 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kump, L. R. & Pollard, D. Science 320, 195 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Schrag, D. Elements 3, 171–178 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. David Beerling is in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. d.j.beerling@sheffield.ac.uk,

    David J. Beerling

Authors
  1. David J. Beerling
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Beerling, D. Enigmatic Earth. Nature Geosci 2, 537–538 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo582

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo582

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing