Researchers from Great Britain, Denmark and the United States have found that the increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, which led to the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), was caused by the growth of volcanic activity. The article of scientists has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
In two cores from the bottom of the North Sea, the researchers discovered the mercury content elevated in relation to “organic” carbon in sedimentary rocks, directly preceding and corresponding to the beginning of the PETM-catastrophic climate warming for several thousand years that occurred 55 million years ago, when Greenland Began to distance from Europe. Large-scale volcanic eruptions, researchers emphasize, lead to the emission of a large number of mercury. Thus, it can be an indicator of increased volcanism, which probably became a “trigger”, led to the beginning of Petm.
At the same time, in the rocks corresponding to the early stages of PETM, the level of mercury content sharply fell – which, according to scientists, suggests that the release of greenhouse gases contributed to at least another carbon tank in addition to the North Atlantic Magmatic province. “Vulcanism led to warming was probably an extensive intrusion that led to the emergence of thousands of hydrothermal sources on an unprecedented level today. The likely a second source of greenhouse gases was caused by volcanism melting of permafrost and sea gaseous hydrates,” – suggests one of the researchers Kender.