Lowell D. Stott
Environment, World
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Deep Sea Carbon Reservoirs Once Superheated the Earth – Could It Happen Again?
Over the past two decades, ocean scientists have discovered that there are reservoirs of liquid and solid carbon dioxide accumulating at the bottom of the ocean, within the rocks and sediments on the margins of active hydrothermal vents.
As concern grows over human-induced climate change, many scientists are looking back through Earth’s history to events that can shed light on changes occurring today. Analyzing how the planet’s climate system has changed in the past improves our understanding of how it may behave in the future.
It is now clear from these studies that abrupt warming events are built into Earth’s climate system. They have occurred when disturbances in carbon storage at Earth’s surface released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One of the grand challenges for climate scientists like me is to determine where these releases came from before humans were present, and what triggered them. Importantly, we want to know if such an event could happen again.
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