Uncomfortable parallels to today As was the case during the Paleocene, our modern Earth has reserves of permafrost and methane hydrates that were ‘banked’ during the cool Pleistocene ice age all the way up to the pre-industrial era. And even though some interglacials may have been warmer than the preindustrial era, deep-ocean temperatures appear to have been only slightly elevated, keeping most deep sea methane locked away - until now. A Paleocene-to-Eocene-like methane release is expected from modern climate change because the deep oceans are now warming by a magnitude unprecedented in the past several million years! Last year Zeebe and Zachos compared the long tail of the PETM with our present human-caused global warming. They concluded that our own long hot tail will last tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. But they argued that future environmental effects will: “more likely resemble the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous catastrophes, rather than the PETM,” due to the far more abrupt nature of modern carbon emissions and warming.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 02:02:26 +0000