So the earth controls its temperature over time

Kilometer-thick ice sheets dotted across large parts of the northern hemisphere, giant volcanoes that buried the planet in mercury, and kilometer-wide asteroids that slammed into the surface and unleashed massive tsunamis and rains of glass.

Earth’s climate has undergone a large number of extreme experiences during the planet’s 4.54 billion years. However, it has been home to one form or another of life for the past 3.7 billion years.

Now researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have published a study in the scientific journal Science advanceswhere they assert that our planet has a special stabilizing mechanism, which over hundreds of thousands of years can bring the climate back from the abyss and maintain global temperatures within a stable, habitable level.

Long doubts

The researchers believe the mechanism they have come up with is a geological process, whereby the slow collapse of rocks and rocks eventually pulls carbon out of the atmosphere.

Scientists have long suspected that the process, called silicate weathering, plays an important role in Earth’s carbon cycle. But what were once theoretical musings among climate scientists now has much more scientific backing.

This explains Tess Wiechen Dahl, a geologist at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen who researches stability in the geochemical cycle on Earth. He was not involved in the study, but is nonetheless excited about the US researchers’ work on the mission.

“When you model climate today, you sometimes guess that what happens in a lab experiment will also work globally. That can be risky, because there are many unknown stabilizing and accelerating mechanisms involved. This study takes a new and interesting mathematical approach to a problem, by looking at to temperature curves over the past 65 million years,” he explains.

Researcher: No help now

Other climate models often originate from data from ice ages and ice ages, Tais Wittchen Dahl explains, which with good reason only helps us look at ice periods. Therefore, we have little knowledge of the mechanisms that were at play when there were previously high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but no ice.

In the study, the researchers looked at local temperature curves, including those from the deep sea, which may reflect variations in the average temperature on Earth. Next, they used a mathematical analysis to see if this data revealed patterns, which were characteristic of certain stabilizing mechanisms.

The researchers detected both consistent patterns, that Earth’s temperature fluctuations moderated over 100,000 years, and that the time it took was consistent with silicate weathering being the cause.

But the discovery certainly doesn’t mean we can sit around without worrying about temperature fluctuations and carbon dioxide emissions, Tess Wichen-Dahl also explains.

“None of those who live in 100,000 years will thank you for reducing your carbon dioxide emissions. Because the crisis caused by our current climate situation will give way to new people who will arrive in 100,000 years. But most of us think of one next generation, maybe two at the most – That’s a response time of 100,000 years.”

At the moment, geologists around the world are working on a solution to increase silicate weathering and thus extract carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere faster.