The world is waking up to the fact that human-driven carbon emissions are responsible for warming our climate, driving unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and placing us on course for the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history.
The world is waking up to the fact that human-driven carbon emissions are responsible for warming our climate, driving unprecedented changes to ecosystems, and placing us on course for the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history.
However, new research publishing this week in leading international journal PNAS, sheds fresh light on the complicated interplay of factors affecting global climate and the carbon cycle – and on what transpired millions of years ago to spark two of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history.
Using chemical data from ancient mudstone deposits in Wales, an international team involving scientists from Trinity discovered that periodic changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the Sun were partly responsible for changes in the carbon-cycle and global climate during and in between the Triassic–Jurassic Mass Extinction (around 201 million years ago, when around 80% of the species on Earth disappeared forever) and the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (around 183 million years ago).
Read more at Trinity College Dublin
Image: Geologists studying the Lower Jurassic (Pliensbachian) Belemnite Marl Member mudstone succession in Dorset, UK, showing orbitally paced variations of the sediment composition similar to the studied core in Wales. (Credit: Dr Micha Ruhl)
