Climate Change - The Last Interglacial

This graph shows how carbon dioxide has increased and decreased over hundreds of thousands of years.


The low readings match with times called 'glacial stages'.

During glacial stages, ice covered large areas of the Earth.

The peaks in the graph show times when carbon dioxide was high, matching times called 'interglacial stages'.

The most recent glacial stage occurred between about 115,000 and 11,500 years ago. 

The last interglacial period occurred before it, from around 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.

It's official international name is the Eemian, but it has other names in specific places.
Climate information from that time is particularly useful.
During that time, temperatures on earth were higher at the poles than they are now. 
The sea level was between five and nine metres higher than current levels, because of the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
In the UK, this last interglacial period is called the 'Ipswichian'.
Pleistocene, Ipswichian raised beach deposits at Hope's Nose, Torquay, Devon, seen from the sea, 6th January 2012, photograph by Nikolett Csorvasi
Above, an interglacial 'raised beach' deposit at 9 metres above sea-level. 
This pebble, shell and sand accumulation is "Ipswichian" in age.
The warming during the last interglacial period was due to natural causes.

These were basically changes in solar radiation hitting the earth, due to the tilt of the earth on its axis. 
We can use past climates as a natural experiment on the Earth’s systems, to consider the way it reacts to warming. 

This earlier warm period is useful to estimate what the future has in store, but had some different features.
The Eemian began when the previous glacial stage ended, and that glaciation was on a bigger scale than the more recent one that came before our interglacial, the Holocene.

New research has helped to explain the processes that happened as that earlier glacial stage ended.

Because more melt water ended up in the north Atlantic, the Arctic appears to have remained colder during the Eemian than it has during the Holocene.

Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change - The link with mass extinctions

Image
What is the worst-case scenario for climate change? The geological record shows that when the atmosphere suddenly changes, there are big effects on living things. Five major  mass extinction  events are recorded in the rock record of the last 600 million years. The biggest extinction was at the end of the  Permian , around 252 million years ago. It is called the  End-Permian mass extinction. Only about 8% of species survived to live on in the Triassic Period. This photo shows geologists investigating tilted sedimentary rocks at Shangsi in South China. Triassic rocks (at the top right) lie over the older Permian rocks. Each mass extinction in the rocks matches with a change in the chemistry of the rocks called a ' carbon excursion '. Some of the carbon excursions are 'negative CEs' and some are 'positive CEs'. Negative CEs  indicate that lots of gaseous carbon compounds escaped into the air, causing warming. These are sometime
Read more

Climate Change - The Greenhouse Effect

Image
What do scientists mean by the " Greenhouse Effect "? When the Sun's energy arrives at the Earth, it travels through the air. Some is reflected back to space, but some hits the Earth and warms it. The warm Earth gives off  infrared radiation  with various wavelengths.   Some of those waves can pass back out of the air to space, but some are absorbed by certain gases in the air. The gases then re-emit the energy into the air. If there are more of those gases, less heat escapes into space. An extreme case has happened on Venus. Concentrated  'greenhouse gases'  on Venus have caused the surface temperature to rise to 735  Kelvin  (462 degrees C; around 900 degrees F) Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen quickly  since people began burning large quantities of fossil fuels. There was carbon dioxide in the air before that, at around 270 parts per million. Without any carbon dioxide, the Earth would be very cold.
Read more

Climate Change - Coal and carbon dioxide

Image
Coal, oil and natural gas are  fossil fuels . When they are burned, they  change the Earth's atmosphere. How is that possible?       C oal  is a good example. Coal was formed  hundreds of millions of years ago . Geologists say that a three-metre (10-foot) coal seam took between  12,000 and 60,000 years  to form . Ancient trees and other plants lived, died and were fossilised. All those plants took  carbon dioxide  out of the atmosphere.  Some larger coal seams are, for example, 10 metres thick. They took around  40,000 years to form,  but have been mined and burned in a little over  100 years. The fastest rise of CO 2  in the air seen in   the ice core record (800,000 years)  is  20 ppm in 1000 years. The CO 2  level in the atmosphere is now rising at around  20 ppm per decade . The  carbon  joins up with  oxygen  when it burns. Each carbon atom joins with two oxygen atoms to make a  carbon dioxide molecule .  As a result, oxygen concentration i
Read more