Arctic Ocean sported Florida's warmth 55 million years ago

Arctic Ocean sported Florida's warmth 55 million years ago
Can you imagine the Arctic Ocean being as hot as 74 degree Fahrenheit? It might be difficult to in this day and age but if you existed around 55 million years, you would have seen this in reality.

An in-depth analysis of core samples obtained from a seabed close to the North Pole showed that the Arctic's annual average that many years ago was 74 degree Fahrenheit. For the analysis, scientists used samples that were taken in 2004 from a seabed that lay 1,000 meters below the surface of the sea. Researchers had then extracted 430 meter slabs of sediments, fossils and rock samples to study what the climatic conditions 56 million years ago were. The findings came as a surprise.

“Something extra happens when you push the world into a warmer world, and we just don't understand what it is,” said Henk Brinkhuis of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who was involved in the analysis. “Imagine that the Arctic Ocean was a giant lake, with this vegetation growing on it. What these findings say is that the Arctic Ocean must have been isolated, or nearly cut off, from the Atlantic Ocean by land masses that later shifted into the present continents,” added the Netherlands' Utrecht University researcher.

Planktons, which usually give an accurate account of climatic changes were absent in the cores and so, scientists studied the chemical composition in the fossils of Crenarchaeota, a kind of microbe, to gauge the shifts. Mark Pagani, another researcher involved in the analysis, likened the climate back then to Florida's climate now. “Imagine a world where there are dense sequoia trees and cypress trees like in Florida that ring the Arctic Ocean,” he said.

The findings, published in the journal Nature in three different articles, confirm that Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a phenomenon wherein the entire Earth heated up due to a gigantic release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, had indeed taken place back then. Though many scientists have tried coming up with a cause for PETM, no satisfactory explanation has been found yet. According to the scientists, the Earth subsequently cooled due to ferns that might have absorbed the gases.

The latest analysis also cast a shadow over the accuracy of computer simulations. Researchers found that computer models were, on an average, 18 degree Fahrenheit off the mark when it came to showing how warm the temperatures were millions of years ago. “Today's models under-predict how warm the poles were back then, which tells you something disturbing – that the models, if anything, aren't sensitive enough to greenhouse gases,” said Matthew Huber of US' Purdue University. The presence of some pebbles the sizes of small blobs implied that glaciers came about 14 millions years before they were believed to have been formed.

A significant aspect of the findings was the control that greenhouse gases have on global climate. Considering a natural emission of greenhouse gases back then could create such a massive change in the Arctic's climate, the implications for the Earth's climate due to release of greenhouses by industrialized nations are worrisome.

“We anticipate that our data will be used by climate modelers to give us better information about how climate change occurs and possibly where global climate might be leading. Today's warming of the Arctic can, in all likelihood, be attributed to mankind's impact on the planet, but as our data suggest, natural processes operating in the past have also resulted in a significant warming and cooling of the Arctic,” said Kate Moran, a University of Rhode Island expert who led one of the three studies.