Apr 11, 2011 09:46 GMT  ·  By
Fossils recovered from the Arctic Circle yield new insight into past global warming events
   Fossils recovered from the Arctic Circle yield new insight into past global warming events

Investigators from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) say that analyzing ancient, fossilized mollusks is now yielding more insight into how Earth's climate behaved when past global warming events led to the meltdown of the entire polar ice cap.

This is the future that awaits us as well, if we do not act soon to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit in the atmosphere. Global warming is now more real than ever, simply because we are now contributing to it, whereas billions of years ago we didn't.

The UCLA group says that the fossils they are now analyzing are about 3.5 billion years old, which means that they started forming when the Earth was just around 1.1 billion years old. As such, they holds clues of an environment long since gone.

Studies of the mollusk shells show that they most likely lived in a time when the planet was so hot, that the polar ice cap covering the North Pole was entirely gone during the summer. Such will be the case with the Arctic again in a few decades, climate scientists warn.

But the thing scientists are most interested in is calculating the long-term effects of high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, such as the ones we are seeing in Earth's air today. This gas, alongside methane, are the primary culprits of global warming, and the climate change it is triggering.

All the mollusks belong to the early Pliocene Epoch, which spanned from 4 to 3.5 billion years ago. Studies have demonstrated that average temperatures at the time were 18 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are now.

“Our data from the early Pliocene, when carbon dioxide levels remained close to modern levels for thousands of years, may indicate how warm the planet will eventually become if carbon dioxide levels are stabilized at the current value of 400 parts per million,” explains Aradhna Tripati.

“The [UN] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies the early Pliocene as the best geological analog for climate change in the 21st century and beyond,” the expert goes on to say.

“The climate-modeling community hopes to use the early Pliocene as a benchmark for testing models used for forecasting future climate change,” she adds. Tripati holds an appointment as an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Daily Galaxy reports.

She also teaches students of the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and is a researcher with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the university.