Polar and Tropical Temperatures Nearly the Same 50 to 60 Million Years Ago
12.10.2009 - Atmosphere & Space, Water & Oceans, Ice & Snow, Human Dimension, Other, Antarctic
Some 50 to 60 million years ago the temperature difference between thesea waters near the equator and at the poles was very small: This is theconclusion reached by a team of scientists from Utrecht University, the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and the Universityof California at Santa Cruz after analyzing sediments retrieved fromthe ocean floor east of Tasmania, an area which bordered Antarctica at the time.
After previous evidence of past Greenhouse climates in the Arctic, when the Earth was much hotter than it is today, the study comes as a breakthrough, as climate scientists had previously known little about Greenhouse climates in the Antarctic. After the warmest phase of the Greenhouse climate about 50 million years ago, temperatures cooled down to an Icehouse state like today.
Past Greenhouse climates can serve as an analogue for future climates, with temperatures warmer than any used for prediction in any of computer models used in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, meaning climate change could be far more severe than the IPCC's worst case scenario.
