Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales
Name
sciadv.adc9241.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
701.74 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
67c618778e871875d98156ee4671e1f6
Author(s)
Arnscheidt, Constantin W
Rothman, Daniel H
Date Issued
November 16, 2022
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Arnscheidt, Constantin W and Rothman, Daniel H. 2022. "Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales." Science Advances, 8 (46).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The question of how Earth’s climate is stabilized on geologic time scales is important for understanding Earth’s history, long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change, and planetary habitability. Here, we quantify the typical amplitude of past global temperature fluctuations on time scales from hundreds to tens of millions of years and use it to assess the presence or absence of long-term stabilizing feedbacks in the climate system. On time scales between 4 and 400 ka, fluctuations fail to grow with time scale, suggesting that stabilizing mechanisms like the hypothesized “weathering feedback” have exerted dominant control in this regime. Fluctuations grow on longer time scales, potentially due to tectonically or biologically driven changes that make weathering act as a climate forcing and a feedback. These slower fluctuations show no evidence of being damped, implying that chance may still have played a nonnegligible role in maintaining the long-term habitability of Earth.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adc9241
