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They showed that weathering of the land surface had not increased at all, based on measurements of the isotope beryllium-10, produced by cosmic radiation, and its ratio to the stable isotope beryllium-9 in ocean sediments. But this was clearly not the case over the past 15 million years.Ĭaves Rugenstein’s co-author von Blanckenburg at the GFZ and his colleague Jane Willenbring had expressed doubts about the hypothesisīack in 2010. “That would have turned our planet into an icy wasteland hostile to life,” Caves Rugenstein said. “But that’s something we can’t put precise numbers on.”Īn increased rate of erosion would have been accompanied by an increase in weathering, and thus carbon dioxidelosses – to such an extent that there would have been very little carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere after less than one million years. This mountain-forming hypothesis assumes that there was a large increase in erosion. “But there’s a big catch to this story,” says Caves Rugenstein, the lead author of the study and a former fellow of the Geological Institute at ETH Zurich. “It requires weathering and subsequent carbonate burial in the ocean to drawn down the CO 2 on long timescales, so this gives us an idea of how sensitive the Earth system is to perturbations in the carbon cycle and also to the changes we’re imposing.” Problems with the “mountain-forming” hypothesis “We want to understand the long-term carbon cycle because of what we’re doing to the Earth – we are imposing a large imbalance on the Earth system,” Ibarra said. The carbonic acid then bonds with ions such as magnesium or calcium, which has the effect of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
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Some minerals in the rocks react easily with carbonic acid, which is produced when atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves in rainwater. This concept also applies to the weathering of rocks. Reactivity is the term chemists use to describe how “willing” a chemical bond or an element is to react in other words, how quickly they attract a partner with which to undergo a chemical reaction. “As we get more and more datasets, we’re able to better constrain the problem.” “People have been debating this since the 1980s,” said Ibarra, who primarily works with geological sciences professor Page Chamberlain at Stanford. However, what did increase during that period was the “reactivity” of the land surface – and it was this increase in reactivity that caused the continuous but decisive reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide and hence the global cooling. We want to understand the long-term carbon cycle because of what we’re doing to the Earth – we are imposing a large imbalance on the Earth system. Using a model and previously published data, Ibarra, Jeremy Caves Rugenstein and Friedhelm von Blanckenburg discovered that weathering was constant during the period in question, between 15 million years ago and the start of the ice age 2.5 million years ago.
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“If you look back in the literature, the rate of weathering that was suggested would have dropped us into a full ice house and glaciated the entire world – and that’s not actually what happened,” said co-author Daniel Ibarra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geological Sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Their study was published July 3 in the journal Nature. Demonstrated that this hypothesis is not accurate enough.