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Polar core is hot stuff

There was once little difference between equatorial and arctic climates.

A core of sediment pulled from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean has confirmed that, millions of years ago, the North Pole was as warm as a balmy summer day.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on May 31, 2006 06:17 PM |

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Tracked on June 27, 2006 07:30 AM

Comments

What ever the true facts of the core samples and relative temperatures tell us about Earth's history, you can count on two interpretations:

(1) Liberal Democrat's with their inborn arrogance will believe Man (mostly USA men) is in complete command of causing the polar caps to melt and,
(2) Conservative Republican's with their lack of leadership will believe Man's part in Global Warming is insignificant and truly nothing can be done to slow the Earth's natural tendency to warm.

Raymond Rodriguez

Posted by: Raymond Rodriguez | June 1, 2006 02:20 PM

I just want to make sure I got this story straight...45 million years ago, there were no humans around, and greenhouse gases were vastly higher than current levels? Beyond that, the greenhouse cases actually caused the polar caps to freeze!?! If I'm interpreting this article incorrectly, please set me straight. Otherwise, what the heck does this say about current global warming theory? Back to the drawing board with those climate models, boys!

Peter Woram

[editor's note: Our planet has been through many major climate changes over geological history. With regards to the current heating of our planet, it is important to note that greenhouse gases are highest now than in 650,000 years (see http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051121/full/051121-14.html) - a fairly large chunk of time! Of course things were, however, radically different in the far, far distant past. It would not have been an increase in greenhouse gases that would cause the poles to ice up, but rather probably a drop in these gases.]

Posted by: Peter Woram | June 1, 2006 07:10 PM

The emerging paleoclimatic picture makes me inclined to ask a simple question: if the global climate has changed so dramatically in the past, what were the prior triggers to such change? Although I certainly believe that our anthropogenic activities do affect earth's climate, I wonder if we are also just a smaller part of a larger, more forceful, natural gas/water cycle that changes the earth's climate periodically (albeit on a timescale that is hard for humans to imagine, since most of us can hardly think past a few years ... or decades; the possibility of million-year cycles is hard but not impossible to imagine). A similar release of significant greenhouse gases from buried clathrate sources(e.g., methane) has been implicated in the Permian extinction - one of the largest and most broad of the extinctions ever registered on our planet. So, are we living in a time (for good or bad) when the earth's natural cycles are about to change - bringing about a host of other 'earth changes'? Thoughts?

Posted by: Leigh Alvarado Benson | June 1, 2006 08:50 PM

Cores and dating is a complicated matter, we have seen a lot of examples of overinterpretation of early results. Basic scepticism is therefore important concerning these types of data. One should always be concerned with how this fits in with the results from other sciences, not least (elementary) geophysics.

Based on our knowledge of the effects of solar radiation angle on the earth's surface: warm around equator, cold in the polar regions, it seems indeed very strange that temperatures should have been so high at the poles. This could only be explained by some kind of strongly enhanced greenhouse effect (from volcanic activity?) combined with enhanced circulation in the atmosphere (and oceans?) counterbalancing the fundamental effect of solar radiation angle (which is the same even if we assume changing solar activity).

Posted by: Karsten Johansen | June 3, 2006 09:37 AM

How does this data compare with the paleolatitude of that crustal material? What is now the arctic may have not been then as a result of the shifting of tectonic plates. I don't know myself, but I see no mention made in this stoty of the possibility.

Posted by: Conrad Fischer | June 5, 2006 06:46 PM

Interesting discussion! also worth noting is that O2 levels are down to as low as 7% in cities like Tokyo from as high as 35% prior to the Industrial revolution.

Posted by: Videokarma | March 14, 2007 05:39 PM

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