Tag: Global warming

Milankovich precession and the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

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About 56 Ma ago there occurred some of the most dramatic biological changes since the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary. They included rapid expansion and diversification of mammals and land plants, and a plunge in the number of deep-water foraminifera. Global cooling from the Cretaceous hothouse was rudely reversed by sudden global warming of about 5 to 10°C. Some climatologists have ascribed bugbear status to the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as a possible scenario for future anthropogenic global warming. The widely accepted cause is a massive blurt into the Palaeocene atmosphere of greenhouse gases, but what caused it is enthusiastically debated. The climate shift is associated with a sudden decrease in the proportion of 13C in marine sediments: a negative spike in δ13C. Because photosynthesis favours the lighter 12C, organic matter has a low δ13C, so a great deal of buried organic carbon may have escaped from the ocean floor, most likely in the form of methane gas. However, massive burning of living terrestrial biomass would produce the same carbon-isotope signal, but absence of evidence for mass conflagration supports methane release. Methane is temporarily held in marine sediments in the form of gas hydrate (clathrate), an ice-like solid that forms at low temperatures on the deep seafloor. Warming of deep sea water or a decrease in pressure, if sea level falls, destabilise clathrates thereby releasing methane gas: the ‘clathrate gun hypothesis’. The main issue is what mechanism may have pulled the trigger for a monstrous methane release.

Massive leak of natural gas – mainly methane – off Sweden in the Baltic Sea, from the probably sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline. (Source: Swedish coastguard agency)

Many have favoured a major igneous event. Between 55.0 and 55.8 Ma basaltic magmatism– continuing today in Iceland – formed the North Atlantic Igneous Province. It involved large-scale intrusion of sills as well as outpourings of flood basalts and coincided with the initial rifting of Greenland from northern Europe (see: Smoking gun for end-Palaeocene warming: an igneous connection; July/August 2004). The occurrence of impact ejecta in end-Palaeocene sediments off the east coast of the US has spawned an extraterrestrial hypothesis for the warming, which could account for the negative spike in δ13C as the product of a burning terrestrial biosphere (see: Impact linked to the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary event; October 2016). Less headline-grabbing is the possibility that the event was part and parcel of the Milankovich effect: an inevitability in the complex interplay between the three astronomical components that affect Earth’s orbital and rotational behaviour: eccentricity, axial tilt and precession. A group of geoscientists from China and the US, led by Mingsong Li of Peking University, have investigated in minute detail the ups and downs of δ13C around 56 Ma in drill cores recovered from a sequence of Palaeocene and Eocene continental-shelf sediments in Maryland, USA (Li, M., Bralower, T.J. et al. 2022. Astrochronology of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum on the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Nature Communications, v. 13, Article 5618; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33390-x).

The study involved sampling sediment for carbon- and oxygen-isotope analysis at depth intervals between 3 and 10 cm over a 35 m section through the lower Eocene and uppermost Palaeocene. Calcium abundances in the core were logged at a resolution of 5 mm using an X-ray fluorescence instrument. The results link to variations in CaCO3 in the sediments across the PETM event. Another dataset involves semi-continuous measurements of magnetic susceptibility (MS) along the core. These measurements are able to indicate variations in delivery to the ocean of dissolved calcium and detrital magnetic minerals as climate and continental weathering vary through time. They are widely known to be good recorders of Milankovich cycles. After processing, the Ca and MS data sets show cyclical fluctuations relative to depth within the cores. ‘Tuning’ their frequencies to the familiar time series of Milankovich astronomical climate forcing reveals a close match to what would be expected if the climate fluctuations were paced by the 26 ka axial precession signal. My post of 17 June 2022 about the influence of precession over ‘iceberg armadas’ during the Pleistocene might be useful to re-read in this context. This correlation enabled the researchers to convert depth in the cores to time, so that the timing of fluctuations in carbon- and oxygen-isotope data that the PETM had created could be considered against various hypotheses for its cause. The ‘excursions’ of both began at the same time and reached the maxima of their changes from Palaeocene values over about 6,000 years. The authors consider that is far too long to countenance the release of methane as a result of asteroidal impact, or by massive burning of terrestrial vegetation. The other option that the beginning of the North Atlantic Igneous Province had been the trigger may also be ruled out on two grounds: the magmatism began earlier, and it continued for far longer. The onset of the PETM coincides with an extreme in precession-related climatic forcing. So Li et al. consider that a quirk in the Milankovich Effect could have played a role in triggering massive methane release. This might also explain features of the global calcium record in seafloor sediments as results of a brief period of ocean acidification during the PETM. Such an event would play havoc with carbonate-secreting organisms, such as foraminifera, by lowering the dissolved carbonate ion content on which they depend for their shells: hence their suffering considerable extinction. Of course, the other elements of astronomical forcing – eccentricity and axial tilt – would also have been operating on global climate at the time.  The long-term 100 and 405 ka eccentricity cycles may have played a role in amplifying warming, which may have resulted in increased burial of organic carbon and thus the amount of methane buried beneath the seabed.

Climate change reducing Earth’s albedo

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According to a new study (Goode, P. R.et al. 2021. Earth’s albedo 1998–2017 as measured from earthshine. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 48, article e2021GL094888; DOI: 10.1029/2021GL094888) the ability of the Earth to reflect solar radiation back into space has been decreasing significantly over the last two decades. The conclusion has arisen from measurements of the brightness of the lunar surface. A new Moon is barely visible, apart from a thin sliver illuminated by the Sun. Its overall faint brightness is due to sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface that faces the Moon: so-called ‘earthshine’. New Moons occurs when it is above the lit side of the Earth, so they appear during daylight hours. Earthshine depends on the ability of the Earth’s surface and cloud cover to reflect solar radiation, or its albedo. Albedo was high during the last ice age because of continental ice sheets and it can also occur when there is an unusually large percentage of cloud cover or a lot of dust and aerosols in the atmosphere, perhaps after a large volcanic eruption. High albedo leads to global cooling. Decreased albedo allows the atmosphere to heat up, and conspires with the greenhouse effect to produce global warming.

Philip Goode and his colleagues measured earthshine on the Moon between 1998 and 2017 to precisely determine daily, monthly, seasonal, yearly and decadal changes in terrestrial albedo. The Earth reflects roughly 30% of the solar energy that falls on it, although it varies with Earth’s rotation, depending on the proportion of land to ocean that is sunlit. Over the two decades earthshine decreased gradually by ~0.5 W m-2, indicating a 0.5% decrease in Earth’s albedo and a corresponding increase in the amount of solar energy received at the land and ocean surfaces. To put this in perspective the estimated warming from anthropogenic greenhouse emissions over the same period increased by just a little more (0.6 W m-2). Albedo decrease is reinforcing the greenhouse effect.

Sea-surface temperature anomalies over the Pacific Ocean during a ‘positive’ phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation – reversal to a ‘negative’ phase cools the eastern Pacific and warms the west (Credit: Wikipedia)

Although it might seem that increased seasonal melting of polar sea ice would have the main effect on albedo, this is not borne out by the earthshine data. What is strongly implicated is a decrease over the Eastern Pacific Ocean of highly reflective low-altitude clouds. That might seem counterintuitive, since warming of the sea surface increases evaporation, but the reduced low-cloud cover has been measured from satellites. Many scientists and most climate-change deniers have thought that an increase in cloud cover at low latitudes and thus albedo would moderate surface warming. The opposite seems to be happening. The key may lie in one of the Earth’s largest climate phenomena, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). This has a major effect on global climate through long-distance connections (teleconnections) to other climatic processes. The satellite data hint at the changes in albedo of the Western Hemisphere having been related to a long-term reversal in the PDO. The Earth’s climate system increasingly reveals its enormous complexity.

See also: Earth is dimming due to climate change, Science Daily, 30 September 2021.

Apocalypse Soon: Will current global warming trigger a mass extinction?

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Since the start of 2020 I doubt there has been much field research. But such a vast amount of data has been amassed over the years that there must be opportunities to keep the academic pot boiling. One way is to look for new correlations between different kinds of data. For instance matching the decades-old time series of extinctions with those of other parameters that have changed over geological time. At a time of growing concern about anthropogenic climate change a group based at the State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology, at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan have checked the extinction rates of marine fossils over the last 450 Ma against variations in sea-surface temperature (Song, H. et al 2021. Thresholds of temperature change for mass extinctions. Nature Communications, v. 12, Article number 4694; DOI: 0.1038/s41467-021-25019-2).

Extinction data are usually presented in time ‘bins’ based on the number of disappearances of fossil genera in one or a number of geological Stages – the finest divisions of the stratigraphic column. The growing data set for sea-surface temperatures derived using oxygen isotopes from marine fossil shells is more continuous, being derived from many different layers of suitable sedimentary rock within a Stage. Clearly, the two kinds of data have to be expressed in a similar way to check for correlations. Haijun Song and co-workers converted both the extinction and temperature time series to 45 time ‘bins’, each around 10 Ma long. They express the binned climatic data in two ways: as the largest temperature change (°C) and the highest rate of temperature change (°C Ma-1) within each bin. That is, they expressed to some extent the greater continuity of seawater temperature data as well as matching them to those for extinctions.

Changes since the end of the Ordovician: red = extinction rate in time bins; green = the greatest magnitude of change in temperature in each bin; blue- the greatest rate of temperature change in each bin. Grey bars show mass extinctions (Credit: Song et al., Fig 1)

There are good correlations between the climatic and extinction data, particularly for mass extinctions. Bearing in mind that mass extinctions take place far more rapidly than can be expressed with 10 Ma time bins, the authors were concerned that bias could creep into the binned extinction data. They were able to discount this by examining both data sets in finer detail at the times of the ‘Big 5’ extinctions. Earlier research had identified warming episodes around the times of each mass extinction, often implicating greenhouse-gas emissions from Large Igneous Provinces. Yet there are other factors that may have influenced the 7 ‘lesser’ mass extinctions in the fossil record. The authors are sufficiently confident in the correlations they have revealed to suggest thresholds that seem to have launched major mass extinctions: greater than 5.2 °C and 10 °C Ma-1 for magnitudes and rates of sea-surface temperature change, respectively.

In the context of the modern climate, the data analysis predicts that a rise of 5.2 °C above the preindustrial mean global temperature spells extinctions of ‘Big Five’ magnitude. The rate of temperature increase since 1880 – 0.08 ° per decade – is hugely faster than that expressed by the data that span the last 450 Ma. This is more alarming than the stark Sixth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC released on 9 August 2021.

Climate change has shifted Earth’s poles

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The shifting position of the Tropic of Cancer in Mexico due to nutation from 2005 to 2010 (Credit: Roberto González, Wikimedia Commons)

First suggested by Isaac Newton and confirmed from observations by Seth Chandler in 1891, the Earth’s axis of rotation and thus its geographic poles wander in much the same manner as does the axis of a gyroscope, through a process known as nutation. The best-known movement of the poles – Chandler wobble – results in a change of about 9 metres in the poles’ positions every 433 days, which describes a rough circle around the mean position of each pole. Every 18.6 years the orbital behaviour of the Moon results in a substantially larger shift, illustrated by a shift in the position of the circles of latitude, as above. Essentially, nutation results from the combined effects of gravitational forces imposed by other bodies. The axial precession cycle of 26 thousand years that is part of the Milankovich effect on long-term climate forcing is a result of nutation. But the Earth’s own gravitational field changes too, as mass within and upon it shifts from place to place. So mantle convection and plate tectonics inevitably change Earth’s mode of rotation, as do changes in the Earth’s molten iron core.

The most sensitive instrument devoted to measuring changes in Earth’s gravity is the tandem of two satellites known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Among much else, GRACE has revealed the rate of withdrawal of groundwater from aquifers in Northern India and areas of mass deficit over the Canadian Shield that resulted from melting of its vast ice sheet since 18 ka ago (see: Ice age mass deficit over Canada deduced from gravity data, July 2007). Further GRACE data have now confirmed that more recent melting of polar glaciers due to global warming underlie an unusual reversal and acceleration of polar wandering since the 1990s (Deng, S. et al. 2021. Polar drift in the 1990s explained by terrestrial water storage changes. Geophysical Research Letters, v. 48, online article e2020GL092114; DOI: 10.1029/2020GL092114). In 1995 polar drift changed from southwards to eastwards, and increased by 17 times from its mean speed from 1981 to 1995. That tallies with an increase in the flow of glacial meltwater from polar regions and also with changes in the mass balance of surface and subsurface water at lower latitudes, especially in India, the USA and China where groundwater pumping for irrigation is on a massive scale.

Clearly, human activity is not only changing climate, but also our planet’s astronomical behaviour. That connection, in itself, is enough to set alarm bells ringing, even though the axial shift’s main tangible effect is to change the length of the day by a few milliseconds. Polar wandering has been documented for the last 176 years. Conceivably, data on shifts in past direction and speed may allow climatic changes throughout the industrial revolution to be assessed independently of meteorological data and on a whole-planet basis.

Ses also: Climate has shifted the axis of the Earth (EurekaAlert, 22 April 2021)

Global warming: an important revision

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Part of the turmoil surrounding the issue of anthropogenic global warming hinges on whether or not observed changes in annual mean global temperature since the Industrial Revolution may be due to natural climatic cycles similar to those that operated previously during the Holocene Epoch. Actual measurements of temperatures of the air, sea surface and so on date only as far back at the early 18th century when thermometers were invented. Getting an idea of natural climate change through the 11.65 thousand years since the end of the last period of extensive glaciation depends on a variety of indirect measurements or proxies for temperature. For sea-surface temperature (SST) the proxy of choice is based on the way that surface-dwelling organisms, specifically planktic foraminifera, extract magnesium and calcium from sea water to construct their tests (shells). The warmer the sea surface the more magnesium is incorporated as a trace element into the calcium carbonate that forms their tests. The Mg/Ca ratio in planktic foram tests recovered from sea-floor sediment layers changes in a reliably precise fashion with warming and cooling. Following the Younger Dryas frigid millennium this proxy suggests that the average sea-surface temperature at mid-latitudes in the North Atlantic rose to a maximum of 0.5°C above the present value between 10 to 6 thousand years ago. After this Holocene Climate Optimum the sea surface seems to have cooled until very recently. Much the same pattern has been recorded in sediment cores from many parts of the world. Another approach is based on the varying amount of solar heating modelled by the Milankovich theory of astronomical climatic forcing and a variety of other forcing factors, such as albedo changes and the greenhouse effect. The two sets of data, one measured the other based on well-accepted simulations, do not agree; the modelling suggests a steady rise in SST throughout the Holocene and no climatic optimum. This conundrum either casts doubt on computer modelling of climate forcing, otherwise reliable on the broader time scale, or on some unsuspected aspect of the Mg/Ca palaeothermometer. The second could involve some kind of bias.

Plots of global mean sea-surface temperature estimates during the Holocene: blue – based on the Mg/Ca ratios in the tests of planktic foraminifera; red – the Mg/Ca data corrected for seasonal bias (the pale blue and pink areas encompass the full range of mid-latitude marine records); grey – modelling based on all potential forcing factors, including anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. (credit: Jennifer Hertzberg, 2021; Fig 1)

Samatha Bova of Rutgers University, USA, and colleagues from the US and China have examined the possibility of seasonal bias in estimates of SSTs from West Pacific ocean floor sediment cores off New Guinea  (Bova, S. et al. 2021. Seasonal origin of the thermal maxima at the Holocene and the last interglacial. Nature, v. 589, p. 548–553; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03155-x). First they examined the Mg/Ca proxy record from the last, Eemian interglacial episode (128-115 ka), on the grounds that astronomical modelling indicated much stronger seasonal contrasts in solar warming during that period, whereas other forcing factors were comparatively weak. By calculating the varying sensitivity of the older Mg/Ca record to seasonal factors they were able to devise a method of correcting such records for seasonal bias and apply it to the Holocene data from northeast New Guinea. The corrected Holocene SST record lacks the previously suspected climate optimum and its peak at ~8000 years ago. Instead, it reveals a continuous warming trend throughout the Holocene. The early part is far cooler than previously indicated by uncorrected SST thermometry. That may have resulted from the increased reflection of solar radiation – albedo forcing – from a larger area of remnant ice sheets on high-latitude parts of continents than was present during the warmer early-Eemian interglacial. Final melting of the great ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere took until about 6500 years ago, when albedo effects would be roughly the same as at present. Thereafter, rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases warmed the planet towards modern levels.

Bova et al’s findings fundamentally change the context for modelling future climate change, and also for the interpretation of all previous interglacials, palaeotemperature records from which remain uncorrected. It seems likely that none of them had an early warm episode. As regards the future; climate modelling will have to change its parameters. For climate-change sceptics; two of their favourite arguments have been questioned. There are no longer signs of major, natural  ups and downs in the early Holocene that might suggest that current warming is simply repeating such fluctuations. The other aspect of the Holocene climate conundrum, that greenhouse gases increased naturally since 6000 years ago while global mean SSTs declined, has been removed from the sceptics’ arguments

See also: Hertzberg, J. 2021. Palaeoclimate puzzle explained by seasonal variation. Nature, v. 589, p. 521-522; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-00115-x. Kiefer, P. 2021. Earth used to be cooler than we thought, which changes our math on global warming, Popular Science, 28 January 2021

Thawing permafrost, release of carbon and the role of iron

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Projected shrinkage of permanently frozen ground i around the Arctic Ocean over the next 60 years

Global warming is clearly happening. The crucial question is ‘How bad can it get?’ Most pundits focus on the capacity of the globalised economy to cut carbon emissions – mainly CO2 from fossil fuel burning and methane emissions by commercial livestock herds. Can they be reduced in time to reverse the increase in global mean surface temperature that has already taken place and those that lie ahead? Every now and then there is mention of the importance of natural means of drawing down greenhouse gases: plant more trees; preserve and encourage wetlands and their accumulation of peat and so on. For several months of the Northern Hemisphere summer the planet’s largest bogs actively sequester carbon in the form of dead vegetation. For the rest of the year they are frozen stiff. Muskeg and tundra form a band across the alluvial plains of great rivers that drain North America and Eurasia towards the Arctic Ocean. The seasonal bogs lie above sediments deposited in earlier river basins and swamps that have remained permanently frozen since the last glacial period. Such permafrost begins at just a few metres below the surface at high latitudes down to as much as a kilometre, becoming deeper, thinner and more patchy until it disappears south of about 60°N except in mountainous areas. Permafrost is melting relentlessly, sometimes with spectacular results broadly known as thermokarst that involves surface collapse, mudslides and erosion by summer meltwater.

Thawing permafrost in Siberia and associated collapse structures

Permafrost is a good preserver of organic material, as shown by the almost perfect remains of mammoths and other animals that have been found where rivers have eroded their frozen banks. The latest spectacular find is a mummified wolf pup unearthed by a gold prospector from 57 ka-old permafrost in the Yukon, Canada. She was probably buried when a wolf den collapsed. Thawing exposes buried carbonaceous material to processes that release CO2­, as does the drying-out of peat in more temperate climes. It has long been known that the vast reserves of carbon preserved in frozen ground and in gas hydrate in sea-floor sediments present an immense danger of accelerated greenhouse conditions should permafrost thaw quickly and deep seawater heats up; the first is certainly starting to happen in boreal North America and Eurasia. Research into Arctic soils had suggested that there is a potential mitigating factor. Iron-3 oxides and hydroxides, the colorants of soils that overlie permafrost, have chemical properties that allow them to trap carbon, in much the same way that they trap arsenic by adsorption on the surface of their molecular structure (see: Screening for arsenic contamination, September 2008).

But, as in the case of arsenic, mineralogical trapping of carbon and its protection from oxidation to CO2 can be thwarted by bacterial action (Patzner, M.S. and 10 others 2020. Iron mineral dissolution releases iron and associated organic carbon during permafrost thaw. Nature Communications, v. 11, article 6329; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20102-6). Monique Patzner of the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and her colleagues from Germany, Denmark, the UK and the US have studied peaty soils overlying permafrost in Sweden that occurs north of the Arctic Circle. Their mineralogical and biological findings came from cores driven through the different layers above deep permafrost. In the layer immediately above permanently frozen ground the binding of carbon to iron-3 minerals certainly does occur. However, at higher levels that show evidence of longer periods of thawing there is an increase of reduced iron-2 dissolved in the soil water along with more dissolved organic carbon – i.e. carbon prone to oxidation to carbon dioxide. Also, biogenic methane – a more powerful greenhouse gas – increases in the more waterlogged upper sediments. Among the active bacteria are varieties whose metabolism involves the reduction of insoluble iron in ferric oxyhdroxide minerals to the soluble ferrous form (iron-2). As in the case of arsenic contamination of groundwater, the adsorbed contents of iron oxyhydroxides are being released as a result of powerful reducing conditions.

Applying their results to the entire permafrost inventory at high northern latitudes, the team predicts a worrying scenario. Initial thawing can indeed lock-in up to tens of billion tonnes of carbon once preserved in permafrost, yet this amounts to only a fifth of the carbon present in the surface-to-permafrost layer of thawing, at best. In itself, the trapped carbon is equivalent to between 2 to 5 times the annual anthropogenic release of carbon by burning fossil fuels. Nevertheless, it is destined by reductive dissolution of its host minerals to be emitted eventually, if thawing continues. This adds to the even vaster potential releases of greenhouse gases in the form of biogenic methane from waterlogged ground. However, there is some evidence to the contrary. During the deglaciation between 15 to 8 thousand years ago – except for the thousand years of the Younger Dryas cold episode – land-surface temperatures rose far more rapidly than happening at present. A study of carbon isotopes in air trapped as bubbles in Antarctic ice suggests that methane emissions from organic carbon exposed to bacterial action by thawing permafrost were much lower than claimed by Patzner et al. for present-day, slower thawing (see: Old carbon reservoirs unlikely to cause massive greenhouse gas release, study finds. Science Daily, 20 February 2020) – as were those released by breakdown of submarine gas hydrates.

Can rock weathering halt global warming?

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The Lockdown has hardly been a subject for celebration, but there have been two aspects that are, to some extent, a comfort: the trickle of road traffic and the absence of convection trails. As a result the air is less polluted and much clearer, and the quietness, even in cities, has been almost palpable. Wildlife seems to have benefitted and far less CO2 has been emitted. Apart from the universal tension of waiting for one of a host of potential Covid-19 symptoms to strike and the fact that the world economy is on the brink of the greatest collapse in a century, it is tempting to hope that somehow business-as-usual will remain this way. B*gger the gabardine rush to work and the Great Annual Exodus to ‘abroad’. The crisis in the fossil fuel industry can continue, as far as I am concerned, But then, of course, I am retired, lucky to have a decent pension and live rurally. Despite the health risks, however, global capital demands that business-as-it-was must return now. A planet left to that hegemonic force has little hope of staving off anthropogenic ecological decline. But is there a way for capital to ‘have its cake and eat it’? Some would argue that there are indeed technological fixes. Among them is sweeping excess of the main greenhouse gas ‘under the carpet’ by burying it. There are three main suggestions: physically extracting CO2 where it is emitted and pumping it underground into porous rocks; using engineered biological processes in the oceans to take carbon into planktonic carbohydrate or carbonate shells and disposing the dead remains in soil or ocean-floor sediments; enhancing and exploiting the natural weathering of rock. The last is the subject of a recent cost-benefit analysis (Beerling, D.J. and 20 others 2020. Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands. Nature, v. 583, p. 242–248; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9).

Carbon dioxide in the rock cycle (Credit: Skeptical Science, in Wikipedia)

Research into the climatic effects of rock weathering has a long history, for it represents one of the major components of the global carbon cycle, as well as the rock cycle. Natural chemical weathering is estimated to remove about a billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon annually. That is because the main agent of weathering is the slightly acid nature of rainwater, which contains dissolved CO2 in the form of carbonic acid (H2CO3). This weak acid comprises hydrogen ions (H+), which confer acidity, that are released by the dissolution of CO2 in water, together with HCO3–ions (bicarbonate, now termed hydrogen carbonate). During weathering the hydrogen ions break down minerals in rock. This liberates metals that are abundant in the silicate minerals that make up igneous rocks – predominantly Na, Ca, K, and Mg – as their dissolved ions, leaving hydrated aluminium silicates (clay minerals) and iron oxides as the main residues, which are the inorganic basis of soils. The dissolved metals and bicarbonate ions may ultimately reach the oceans. However, calcium and magnesium ions in soil moisture readily combine with bicarbonate ions to precipitate carbonate minerals in the soil itself, a process that locks-in atmospheric carbon. Another important consequence of such sequestration is that it may make the important plant nutrient magnesium – at the heart of chlorophyll – more easily available and it neutralises any soil acidity built-up by continuous agriculture.  But carbon sequestration naturally achieved by weathering amounts to only about a thirtieth of that emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, and we know that is incapable of coping with the build-up of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere: it certainly has not since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

What could chemical weathering do if it was deliberately enhanced?  One of the most common rocks, basalt, is made up of calcium-rich feldspar and magnesium-rich pyroxene and olivine. In finely granulated form this mix is particularly prone to weathering, and the magnesium released would enrich existing soil as well as drawing down CO2. Hence the focus by David Beerling and his British, US and Belgian colleagues on systematic spreading of ground-up basalt on cropland soils, in much the same way as crushed limestone is currently applied to reverse soil acidification. It is almost as cheap as conventional liming, with the additional benefit of fertilising: it would boost to crop yields. The authors estimate that removal of a metric ton of CO2 from the atmosphere by this means would cost between US$ 55 to 190, depending on where it was done. One of their findings is that the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide – China, the US and India – happen to have the greatest potential for carbon sequestration by enhanced weathering. Incidentally, increased fertility also yields more organic waste that itself could be used to increase the actual carbon content of soils, if converted through pyrolysis to ‘biochar’ .

It all sounds promising, almost ‘too good to be true’. The logistics that would be needed and the carbon emissions that the sheer mass of rock to be finely ground and then distributed would entail, for as long as global capital continues to burn fossil fuels, are substantial, as the authors admit. The grinding would have to be far more extreme than the production of igneous-rock road aggregate. Basalt or related rock is commonly used for resurfacing motorways, not especially well known for degrading quickly to a clay-rich mush. It would probably have to be around the grain size achieved by milling to liberate ore minerals in metal mines, or to produce the feedstock for cement manufacture: small particles create a greater surface area for chemical reactions. But there remains the issue of how long this augmented weathering would take to do the job: its efficiency. Experimental weathering to test this great-escape hypothesis is being conducted by a former colleague of mine, using dust from an Irish basalt quarry to coat experimental plots of a variety of soil types. After two months Mg and Ca ions were indeed being released from the dust, and tiny fragments of olivine, feldspar and pyroxene do show signs of dissolution. Whether this stems from rainwater – the main objective – or from organic acids and bacteria in the soils is yet to be determined. No doubt NASA is doing much the same to see if dusts that coat much of Mars can be converted into soils  Beerling et al. acknowledge that the speed of weathering is a major uncertainty. Large-scale field trials seem some way off, and are likely to be plagued by cussedness! Will farmers willingly change their practices so dramatically?

See also: Lehmann, J & Possinger, A. 2020. Removal of atmospheric CO2 by rock weathering holds promise for mitigating climate change. Nature, v. 583, p. 204-205; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01965-7

Note (added 15 July 2020): Follower Walter Pohl has alerted me to an interesting paper on using ultramafic rocks in the same way (Kelemen, P.B. et al. 2020. Engineered carbon mineralization in ultramafic rocks for CO2 removal from air: Review and new insights. Chemical Geology, v.  550, Article 119628; DOI:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2020.119628). Walter’s own blog contains comments on the climatic efficacy of MgCO3 (magnesite) formed when olivine is weathered.

How permanent is the Greenland ice sheet?

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80% of the world’s largest island is sheathed in glacial ice up to 3 km thick, amounting to 2.85 million km3. A tenth as large as the Antarctic ice sheet, if melted it could still add over 7 m to global sea level if it melted completely; compared with 58 m should Antarctica suffer the same fate. Antarctica accumulated glacial ice from about 34 to 24 million years ago during the Oligocene Epoch, deglaciated to became largely ice free until about 12 Ma and then assumed a permanent, albeit fluctuating, ice cap until today. In contrast, Greenland only became cold enough to support semi-permanent ice cover from about 2.4 Ma during the late-Pliocene to present episode of ice-age and interglacial cycles. The base of the GRIP ice core from central Greenland has been dated at 1 Ma old, but such is the speed of ice movement driven by far higher snow precipitation than in Antarctica that it is possible that basal ice is shifted seawards. The deepest layers recovered by drilling have lost their annual layering as a result of ice’s tendency to deform in a plastic fashion so do not preserve detailed glacial history before about 110 ka. In contrast, the more slowly accumulating and more sluggishly moving Antarctic ice records over 800 ka of climatic cyclicity in continuous cores and has yielded 2.7 Ma old blue ice exposed at the surface with another 2 km lying beneath it.

However, sediments at the base of two ice cores from Greenland have raised the possibility of periods when the island was free of ice. One such example is from an early core drilled to a depth of 1390 m beneath the 1960’s US military’s nuclear weapons base, Camp Century. It helped launch the use of continental ice as a repository of Earth recent climatic history at a far better resolution than do sediment cores from the ocean floors. It languished in cold storage after it was transferred from the US to the University of Copenhagen. Recently, samples from the bottom 3 m of sediment-rich ice were rediscovered in glass jars. A workshop centring on this seemingly unprepossessing material took place in the last week of October 2019 at the University of Vermont, USA (Voosen, P. 2019. Mud in stored ice core hints at thawed Greenland. Science, v. 366, p. 556-557; DOI: 10.1126/science.366.6465.556.

Sediment recovered from the base of the Camp Century core through the Greenland ice sheet (credit Jean-Louis Tison, Free University of Brussels)

To the participants’ astonishment, among the pebbles and sand were fragments of moss and woody material. It was not till, but a soil; Greenland had once lost its ice cover. Measurement of radioactive isotopes 26Al and 10Be, that form when cosmic rays pass through exposed sand grains, revealed that the once vegetated soil had formed at about 400 ka. Preliminary DNA analyses of preserved plant material indicates species that would have thrived at around 10°C. Samples have been shared widely for comprehensive analysis  to reconstruct the kind of surface environment that developed during the 400 ka interglacial. Also, Greenland may have been bare of ice during several such relatively warm intervals. So other cores to the base of the ice may be in the funding pipeline. But most interest centres on the implications of a period of rapid anthropogenic climatic warming that may take Arctic temperatures above those that melted the Greenland ice sheet 400 ka ago.

See also: UVM Today 2019. Secrets under the ice.

The mid-Pleistocene transition

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As shown by oxygen-isotope records from marine sediments, before about 1.25 Ma global climate cycled between cold and warm episodes roughly every 41 ka. Between 1.25 to 0.7 Ma these glacial-interglacial pulses lengthened to the ~100 ka periods that have characterised the last seven cycles that were also marked by larger volume of Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet cover during glacial maxima. Both periodicities have been empirically linked to regular changes in the Earth’s astronomical behaviour and their effects on the annual amount of energy received from the Sun, as predicted by Milutin Milankovich. As long ago as 1976 early investigation of changes of oxygen isotopes with depth in deep-sea sediments had revealed that their patterns closely matched Milankovich’s  hypothesis. The 41 ka periodicity matches the rate at which the Earth’s axial tilt changes, while the ~100 ka signal matches that for variation in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit. 19 and 24 ka cycles were also found in the analysis that reflect those involved in the gyroscope-like precession of the axis of rotation. Surprisingly, the 100 ka cycling follows by far the weakest astronomical effect on solar warming yet the climate fluctuations of the last 700 ka are by far the largest of the last 2.5 million years. In fact the 2 to 8 % changes in solar heat input implicated in the climate cycles are 10 times greater than those predicted even for times when all the astronomical influences act in concert. That and other deviations from Milankovich’s hypothesis suggest that some of Earth’s surface processes act to amplify the astronomical drivers. Moreover, they probably lie behind the mid-Pleistocene transition from 41 to 100 ka cyclicity. What are they? Changes in albedo related to ice- and cloud cover, and shifts in the release and absorption of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are among many suggested factors. As with many geoscientific conundrums, only more and better quality data about changes recorded in sediments that may be proxies for climatic variations are likely to resolve this one.

Adam Hazenfratz of ETH in Zurich and colleagues from several other European countries and the US have compiled details about changing surface- and deep-ocean temperatures and salinity – from δ18O and Mg/Ca ratios in foraminifera shells from a core into Southern Ocean-floor sediments – that go back 1.5 Ma (Hazenfratz, A.P. and 9 others 2019. The residence time of Southern Ocean surface waters and the 100,000-year ice age cycle. Science, v. 363, p. 1080-1084; DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7067). Differences in temperature and salinity (and thus density) gradients show up at different times in this critical sediment record. In turn, they record gross shifts in ocean circulation at high southern latitudes that may have affected the CO2 released from and absorbed by sea water. Specifically, Hazenfratz et al. teased out fluctuations in the rate of  mixing of dense, cold and salty water supplied to the Southern Ocean by deep currents with less dense surface water. Cold, dense water is able to dissolve more CO2 than does warmer surface water so that when it forms near the surface at high latitudes it draws down this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and carries it into long-term storage in the deep ocean when it sinks. Deep-water formation therefore tends to force down mean global surface temperature, the more so the longer it resides at depth. When deep water wells to the surface and warms up it releases some of its CO2 content to produce an opposite, warming influence on global climate. So, when mixing of deep and surface waters is enhanced the net result is global warming, whereas if mixing is hindered global climate undergoes cooling.

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The Southern Ocean, where most dissolved and gaseous carbon dioxide are emitted and absorbed by seawater (Credit: British Antarctic Survey)

The critical factor in the rate of mixing deep with surface water is the density of that at the surface. When its salinity and density are low the surface water layer acts as a lid on what lies beneath, thereby increasing the residence time of deep water and the CO2 that it contains. This surface ‘freshening’ in the Southern Ocean seems to have begun at around 1.25 Ma and became well established 700 ka ago; that is, during the mid-Pleistocene climate transition. The phenomenon helped to lessen the greenhouse effect after 700 ka so that frigid conditions lasted longer and more glacial ice was able to accumulate, especially on the northern continents. This would have made it more difficult for the 41 ka astronomically paced changes in solar heating to have restored the rate of deep-water mixing to release sufficient CO2 to return the climate to interglacial conditions That would lengthen the glacial-interglacial cycles. The link between the new 100 ka cyclicity and very weak forcing by the varying eccentricity of Earth’s orbit may be fortuitous. So how might anthropogenic global warming affect this process? Increased melting of the Antarctic ice sheet may further freshen surface waters of the Southern Ocean, thereby slowing its mixing with deep, CO2-rich deep water and the release of stored greenhouse gases. As yet, no process leading to the decreased density of surface waters between 1.25 and 0.7 Ma has been suggested, but it seems that something similar may attend global warming.

Related articles: Menviel, L. 2019. The southern amplifier. Science, v. 363, p. 1040-1041; DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw7196; The deep Southern Ocean is key to more intense ice ages (Phys.org)

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Gas hydrates: a warning from the past

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Detailed acoustic imaging above the Troll gas field in the northern North Sea off western Norway has revealed  tens of thousands of elliptical pits on the seabed. At around 10 to 20 per square kilometre over an area of about 15,000 km2 there are probably between 150 to 300 thousand of them. They range between 10 to 100 m across and are about 6 m deep on average, although some are as deep as 20 m. They are pretty much randomly distributed but show alignment roughly parallel to regional N-S sea-floor currents. Many of the world’s continental shelves display such pockmark fields, but the Troll example is among the most extensive. Almost certainly the pockmarks formed by seepage of gas or water to the surface. However, detailed observations suggest they are inactive structures with no sign of bubbles or fluid seepage. Yet the pits cut though glacial diamictites deposited by the most recent Norwegian Channel Ice Stream through which icebergs once ploughed and which is overlain by thin Holocene marine sediments. One possibility is that they record gas loss from the Troll field, another being destabilisation of shallow gas hydrate deposits.

Troll pockmarks
Parts of the Troll pockmark field off Norway. A: density of pockmarks in an area of 169 square km. B: details of a cluster of pockmarks. (Credit: Adriano Mazzini, Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) University of Oslo)

Norwegian geoscientists have studied part of the field in considerable detail, analysing carbonate-rich blocks and foraminifera in the pits (Mazzini, A. and 8 others 2017. A climatic trigger for the giant Troll pockmark field in the northern North Sea. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 464, p. 24-34; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.02.014). The carbonates show very negative δ13C values that suggest the carbon in them came from methane, which could indicate either of the two possible means of formation. However, U-Th dating of the carbonates and radiocarbon ages of forams in the marine sediment infill suggest that they formed at around 10 ka ago; 1500 years after the end of the Younger Dryas cold episode and the beginning of the Holocene interglacial. Most likely they represent destabilisation of a once-extensive, shallow layer of methane hydrates in the underlying sediments, conditions during the Younger Dryas having been well within the stability field of gas hydrates. Sporadic leaks from the deeper Troll gas field hosted by Jurassic sandstones is unlikely to have created such a uniform distribution of gas-release pockmarks. Adriano Mazzini and colleagues conclude that rapid early Holocene warming led to sea-floor temperatures and pressures outside the stability field of gas hydrates. There are few signs that hydrates linger in the area, explaining the present inactivity of the pockmarks – all the methane and CO2 escaped before 10 ka.

Gas hydrates are thought to be present beneath shallow seas today, wherever sea-floor sediments have a significant organic carbon content and within the pressure-temperature window of stability of these strange ice-like materials. Mazzini et al.’s analysis of the Troll pockmark field clearly has profound implications for the possible behaviour of gas hydrates at a time of global climatic warming. As well as their destabilisation adding to methane release from onshore peat deposits currently locked by permafrost and a surge in global warming, there is an even more catastrophic possibility. The whole of the seaboard of the southern North Sea was swept by a huge tsunami about 8000 years ago, which possibly wiped out Mesolithic human occupancy of lowland Britain, the former land mass of Doggerland, and the ‘Low Countries’ of western Europe. This was created by a massive submarine landslide – the Storegga Slide just to the north of the Troll field – which may have been triggered by destabilisation of submarine gas hydrates during early Holocene warming of the oceans.