Over the past 720 million years, the Earth has gone through periods of global warming and cooling, which new research ties to volcanic activity related to plate-tectonic movements. The study out of the University of Texas at Austin School of Geosciences examined long-term shifts in the planet's baseline climate and not human-induced or short term examples of climate change, according to a press release. "Our study provides evidence that major changes in Earth's climate over the past ~700 million years were driven by changes in the emission of carbon dioxide from volcanoes," Ryan McKenzie, the study's lead researcher, wrote in an email to CBS News. "The rates of change in the volcanic emissions that we tracked are extremely slow and the amount of carbon dioxide produced by volcanoes is remarkably minor in comparison to modern human-induced emissions, yet these processes are capable of, over long time scales, driving dramatic changes in climate state. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment