Tech | October 08, 2011 | 45 comments

World Without Ice

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coolplanet
56 million years ago a mysterious surge of carbon into the atmosphere sent global temperatures soaring. In a geologic eyeblink life was forever changed.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/10/hothouse-earth/kunzig-text
By Robert Kunzig

Earth has been through this before.

Not the same planetary fever exactly; it was a different world the last time, around 56 million years ago. The Atlantic Ocean had not fully opened, and animals, including perhaps our primate ancestors, could walk from Asia through Europe and across Greenland to North America. They wouldn't have encountered a speck of ice; even before the events we're talking about, Earth was already much warmer than it is today. But as the Paleocene epoch gave way to the Eocene, it was about to get much warmer still—rapidly, radically warmer.
The cause was a massive and geologically sudden release of carbon. Just how much carbon was injected into the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, as scientists now call the fever period, is uncertain. But they estimate it was roughly the amount that would be injected today if human beings burned through all the Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. The PETM lasted more than 150,000 years, until the excess carbon was reabsorbed. It brought on drought, floods, insect plagues, and a few extinctions. Life on Earth survived—indeed, it prospered—but it was drastically different. Today the evolutionary consequences of that distant carbon spike are all around us; in fact they include us. Now we ourselves are repeating the experiment.
The PETM "is a model for what we're staring at—a model for what we're doing by playing with the atmosphere," says Philip Gingerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan. "It's the idea of triggering something that runs away from you and takes a hundred thousand years to reequilibrate."
Gingerich and other paleontologists discovered the profound evolutionary change at the end of the Paleocene long before its cause was traced to carbon. For 40 years now Gingerich has been hunting fossils from the period in the Bighorn Basin, a hundred-mile-long arid plateau just east of Yellowstone National Park in northern Wyoming. Mostly he digs into the flanks of a long, narrow mesa called Polecat Bench, which juts into the northern edge of the basin. Polecat has become his second home: He owns a small farmhouse within sight of it.
One summer afternoon Gingerich and I drove in his sky blue '78 Suburban up a dirt track to the top of the bench and on out to its southern tip, which affords a fine view of the irrigated fields and scattered oil wells that surround it. During the recent ice ages, he explained, Polecat Bench was the bed of the Shoshone River, which paved it with cobbles. At some point the river shifted east and began cutting its way down through the softer and more ancient sediments that fill the Bighorn Basin. Meanwhile the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River was doing the same to the west. Polecat Bench now stands between the two rivers, rising 500 feet above their valleys. Over the millennia its flanks have been sculpted by winter wind and summer gully washers into rugged badlands, exposing a layer cake of sediments. Sediments from the PETM are exposed right at the very southern tip of the bench.
It is here that Gingerich has documented a great mammalian explosion. Halfway down the slope a band of red sediment, about a hundred feet thick, wraps around the folds and gullies, vivid as the stripe on a candy cane. In that band Gingerich discovered fossils of the oldest odd-toed hoofed mammals, even-toed hoofed mammals, and true primates: in other words, the first members of the orders that now include, respectively, horses, cows, and humans. Similar fossils have since been found in Asia and Europe. They appear everywhere, and as if out of nowhere. Nine million years after an asteroid slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula, setting off a cataclysm that most scientists now believe wiped out the dinosaurs, the Earth seems to have undergone another shock to the system.
During the first two decades that Gingerich labored to document the Paleocene-Eocene transition, most scientists saw it simply as a time when one set of fossils gave way to another. That perception started to change in 1991, when two oceanographers, James Kennett and Lowell Stott, analyzed carbon isotopes—different forms of the carbon atom—in a sediment core extracted from the Atlantic seafloor near Antarctica. Right at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary a dramatic shift in the ratio of isotopes in fossils of minuscule organisms called foraminifera (forams for short) indicated that an immense amount of "fresh" carbon had flooded into the ocean in as little as a few centuries. It would have spread into the atmosphere too, and there, as carbon dioxide, it would have trapped solar heat and warmed the planet. Oxygen isotopes in the forams indicated that the whole ocean had warmed, from the surface right down to the bottom mud, where most of the forams lived.
In the early 1990s the same signs of a planetary convulsion began turning up on Polecat Bench. Two young scientists, Paul Koch of the Carnegie Institution and James Zachos, then at the University of Michigan, collected half-inch clumps of carbonate-rich soil from each of the sediment layers. They also collected teeth of a primitive mammal called Phenacodus. When Koch and Zachos analyzed the carbon isotope ratios in the soil and the tooth enamel, they found the same carbon spike seen in the forams. It was becoming clear that the PETM had been a global warming episode that had affected not just obscure sea organisms but also big, charismatic land animals. And scientists saw that they could use the carbon spike—the telltale stamp of a global greenhouse gas release—to identify the PETM in rocks all over the world.
Where did all the carbon come from? We know the source of the excess carbon now pouring into the atmosphere: us. But there were no humans around 56 million years ago, much less cars and power plants. Many sources have been suggested for the PETM carbon spike, and given the amount of carbon, it likely came from more than one. At the end of the Paleocene, Europe and Greenland were pulling apart and opening the North Atlantic, resulting in massive volcanic eruptions that could have cooked carbon dioxide out of organic sediments on the seafloor, though probably not fast enough to explain the isotope spikes. Wildfires might have burned through Paleocene peat deposits, although so far soot from such fires has not turned up in sediment cores. A giant comet smashing into carbonate rocks also could have released a lot of carbon very quickly, but as yet there is no direct evidence of such an impact.
The oldest and still the most popular hypothesis is that much of the carbon came from large deposits of methane hydrate, a peculiar, icelike compound that consists of water molecules forming a cage around a single molecule of methane. Hydrates are stable only in a narrow band of cold temperatures and high pressures; large deposits of them are found today under the Arctic tundra and under the seafloor, on the slopes that link the continental shelves to the deep abyssal plains. At the PETM an initial warming from somewhere—perhaps the volcanoes, perhaps slight fluctuations in Earth's orbit that exposed parts of it to more sunlight—might have melted hydrates and allowed methane molecules to slip from their cages and bubble into the atmosphere.

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45 comments // World Without Ice

  • Gravity_Man
  • Yoopernewsman
    • 0
      Yoopernewsman  
    • Image

    • Many try to claim the world is not facing a tipping point.

      No evidence will convince the greedy - even after the last ice melts at the poles.

      Many think you can abuse the environment without consequence - and sadly its our (and their) grandchildren who will really pay the price (if not sooner).

      This is a NASA photo of the river the international mining corporation Rio Tinto polluted with sulfide mining - a river of the same name.

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • Yoopernewsman:

      A warmed up planet has more volcanoes and volcanoes are what brings much Gold and precious metals up from the earth. Apparently they're banking on the extra methane being released as an acceptable situation long enough for them to fill their coffers.

      Which of course we know they never will, so our future is looking incredibly more bleak than ever. THEY WANT THE NAV~COM, AND THE GOLD.

      That big thing in your back; that's called a screw.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • coolplanet:

      Revelation 11 v 18 contains a PROMISE TO END POLLUTION => " But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

      A time has already been appointed. Several such "appointed time" prophecies have already come true so we can have confidence that will continue to be the case. That being said, I have been given a great gift of solving energy problems and have put those solutions ALL OVER THE INTERNET but they continue to be ignored. Certain people do not want solutions they want to see Jesus first is all I can tell ya.

      Every person on this wonderful planet can have a MINIMUM of 500% the clean electricity they need (zero pollution engines). This is a contrived situation of both the faithful and the faithless to continue. BOTH CAMPS WANT TO SEE THE RAPTURE.

      Which is sad because the Bible does not even have such a word and never did and the church was never supposed to be lifted physically up into the clouds. Being "in the clouds" is a state of being raised up to a higher level of understanding than others.

      The Bible is not hocus-pocus, the people who have added hocus-pocus to it has caused people to turn away. There is no "Burning Hell" either. That's lifted and merged from Dante's Inferno. Hogwash. The "Trinity" teaching~belief is false. People can't handle the truth.

      The appointed time is near, polluters will be erased soon, the planet will be restored by the one who made it in the first place and knows the life matrix. I would also float an additional idea along with that, that those who have refused to use their trillions of dollars to build my zero pollution engines are going to fare poorly. And not just "my" engines but those of many others, Tesla, Sweet being two main inventors.

      Those who think they're going to be hocus-pocus "Raptured" into the clouds are going to find themselves raptured into dust on the ground... after perhaps a few minutes of horror as they watch others falling lifeless on the ground and coming toward them as happened to Pharaoh in Egypt when he mocked Moses.

      It's a lesson they willl learn and no return ticket. There is no resurrection promise for those who die as the result of a judgement... which is called GEHENNA not Hades. For instance, those who mocked Noah and drowned will not be resurrected. Bible Truth is a wonderful thing to learn; unfortunately the many masses have settled for the false, the hocus-pocus, which is from the demons inhabiting their false churches.

      Matthew 19 v 28 Jesus tells a "Re-Creation" event is soon to happen, a replay of Creation, where all we be restored to pristine condition.

      Minus a lot of polluters. They don't make it.

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • Gravity_Man:

      I'm not Jeff Goldblum but the forcefield is down. What "forcefield"? The one that keeps saying the sun isn't powerful enough, THAT FORCEFIELD, THE ONE THAT HAS HELD YOU DOWN ON THE MAT SLAPPING YOUR FACE BLOODY. >>>> THE FORCEFIELD THAT KEEPS SAYING YOU CANT HAVE IT YOU CANT HAVE HAVE IT. WELL, YES YOU CAN.

      Movie: Independence Day, 1996: 15 years ago under alien rule.
      Movie: Independence Day, 1996: 15 years ago under alien rule.
      Movie: Independence Day, 1996: 15 years ago under alien rule.

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • According to recent information the oil discovered under Montana has doubled US oil reserves to 24 BILLION BARRELS => http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/09/1340211/oil-may-be-finite-but-us-product...

      Environmentalism has been thrown under the bus, Green Energy put on the back burner probably awaiting a new president. That's the System => Love it or Leave it Oil has won.

      However, attaining back to a position of Energy Wealth once enjoyed in this United States is a logical Chess move... to a strategic place from which Green technology can be embraced, perhaps around 2525 when Peak Oil really hits home.

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
  • coolplanet
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • Image
    • coolplanet:

      You have a lot of faith [in evolution] that I do not share. Bones don't shrink very fast. Besides, there are people half my size now and I fail to see the size difference helping them do better than me. If anything being smaller makes a person more easily killed by a canteloupe germ.

      Whereas I can eat one or two of those same canteloupes and keep living. I fail to see your logic appear as much more than desperate thinking.

      And yet you share IceKat's feeling an unreasoning hope that life will go on. I suppose that's a good delusion to be holding right up til the fireworks start as any. YES WE CAN!!! The chant of our times from a soon-to-be-deposed Obama and his demon overlords as promised in the Bible Daniel 2 verse 21 =>

      http://www.newpath4.com/ouijaboardsexposeddevilsatandemongamemsgyeswecanwearejeh...

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • JanforGore
    • +1
      JanforGore  

    • "It's just like with fossil fuels today," Zachos says. "We're taking what took millions of years to accumulate and releasing it in a geologic instant. Eventually the system will stick it back into rock, but that will take hundreds of thousands of years."

      Matt Huber, a climate modeler at Purdue University who has spent most of his career trying to understand the PETM, has also tried to forecast what might happen if humans choose to burn off all the fossil fuel deposits. Huber uses a climate model, developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, that is one of the least sensitive to carbon dioxide. The results he gets are still infernal. In what he calls his "reasonable best guess at a bad scenario" (his worst case is the "global-burn scenario"), regions where half the human population now lives become almost unbearable. In much of China, India, southern Europe, and the United States, summer temperatures would average well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, night and day, year after year.

      Climate scientists don't often talk about such grim long-term forecasts, Huber says, in part because skeptics, exaggerating scientific uncertainties, are always accusing them of alarmism. "We've basically been trying to edit ourselves," Huber says. "Whenever we see something really bad, we tend to hold off. The middle ground is actually much worse than people think.

      "If we continue down this road, there really is no uncertainty. We're headed for the Eocene. And we know what that's like."
      ___

      I thought this was an interesting comment based on the report I posted here yesterday that world energy comsumption will double by 2035, primarily in China and India due to fossil fuels. Greed and ignorance is not a good combination.

      http://current.com/community/93483914_worlds-energy-use-to-double-by-2035-driven...

    • 8 months ago
  • IceKat
    • -2
      IceKat  
    • JanforGore:

      More absolute trash based upon nothing more than speculation.
      Global temperatures have varied by less than 1 degree Celsius in well over a century. There is absolutely no foundation for the ridiculous assertion that certain areas will experience 100 degree (F) temperatures "day and night".

      "Greed and ignorance is not a good combination."

      Neither is ignorance and stupidity, but I don't expect to see any cessation of that anytime soon.

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  
    • JanforGore:

      In Nazi Germany science was seen as a Jewish conspiracy to control the masses.
      Many brilliant scientists like Einstein had to flee Germany for their lives.
      The Nazis believed in the Hollow Earth hypothesis, where the sun and the stars are actually inside our planet and we are looking in at them.
      I'm not implying that deniers are nazis, but they are just as stupid and dangerous.

    • 8 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  
    • coolplanet:

      Well there's one thing I can agree with, we won't see any cessation of stupidity about this as long as the deniers keep pushing their fairy tales. I'm beginning to think it is truly a mental illness at this point.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • JanforGore
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • JanforGore:

      Maybe. But his post was basically the post of a simpleton because it ignored #1 the law of exponents and #2 the law of Tipping Points.

      If the climate balance of Planet Earth is viewed as a finely-tuned instrument that can only vary so much to either side, which it is because scientists have told us so (distance from sun and so on), then it doesn't take a genius to figure out we can indeed push past those parameters with the awesome number of combustion engines coal-burning soot-producing power plants and so on.

      The simpleton argument ignores all that. The simpleton says Earth is a giant playground, that yes kiddies we can all get in the pool at the SAME TIME without shoving any water over the sides.

      IceKat is using the child's perspective on you, that's all. To you an adult yes, that would appear to be mental illness, but since it's his mode of argument it isn't => it's a deliberately-chosen psychological torture strategy to break you down; a sledgehammer would be kinder.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • IceKat
    • -1
      IceKat  
    • squarethecircle:

      My points are being proven on a daily basis. Extremists continue to dish out their ridiculous claims, but reality constantly proves them wrong. Extremists can rant on and on all they like about temperatures being constantly 100F in some parts of the world, but there is absolutely no evidence to support this stupid claim.

      "find some empathy"?
      I'm not sure about empathy but I do feel sorry for the terminal depressives who linger here in the last bastion of climate extremism.

    • 8 months ago
  • IceKat
    • 0
      IceKat  
    • Image
    • JanforGore:

      Who denies climate change Jan?

      You deny that climate changed prior to man's use of fossil fuels.
      You deny that severe weather happened prior to man's use of fossil fuels.
      You deny that the planet has experienced warmer periods, often significantly warmer than at present, prior to man's use of fossil fuels.

      No-one I know has ever denied that the planet underwent a slight warming last century.
      No-one I know denies that climate changes - it does, constantly.

      Who are the real deniers, Jan?

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
    • +1
      squarethecircle  

    • I feel global warming is misleading intentionally. We know we are affecting the environment, but there are a great many circumstances that are also affecting Earth that are beyond our control and never get discussed for lack of info. As long as we keep arguing over one point we will never reach a conclusion. We need to treat our surroundings as if we are a part of them because, huh, we are. Our separatist attitude gets us nowhere but lost. After saying that though I also feel we don't comprehend much about the true nature of Earth and the systems present here let alone the fact we are in a universe full of monumental changes we seem to be even more unaware of and would rather just pretend have no impact on our small ball floating therein.

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  

    • Something I've never posted before, perhaps now might be the right time... in the Bible it says there will be a "Great Quake". OK, so everybody plays this guessing game where's the quake, where's the quake?

      Most of you might not be old enough to know this but when the first World War broke out they did not call it WW1 since they didn't know a WW2 was coming, so in the older History books it was called simply "The Great War" because so many countries around tyhe globe became involved.

      I believe that is what the Apostle John's vision was telling us, not ONE great quake but the entire planet having many great quakes. IN OTHER WORDS FRIENDS THAT SCRIPTURE & PROPHECY IS FULFILLED YOU CAN QUIT THE GAMES NOW.

      GAME OVER SOON.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • coolplanet:

      Just saying that a lot of people are reading the Bible too literally therefore they reach incorrect conclusions. People reduce each earthquake down to sizes that pleases them.

      As long as a quake is under 3.5 let's say, it makes people feel rather safe. They have successfully quantified each INDIVIDUAL QUAKE down to a size & energy they can stomach. I was showing how that is a false argument.

      ALL THE QUAKES ~SMALL AND LARGE TAKEN TOGETHER~ ARE FULFILLING THE "GREAT QUAKE" SCENARIO PRESENTED IN REVELATION.

      John was following a standard set by Jesus who taught him, just as Paul used clever tricks in his writings also learned from Jesus. With John he was using ONE to represent MANY. Jesus did that. It was a great teaching method and also very functional.

      We can stop looking out for that ONE GREAT QUAKE because the prophecy has been fulfilled by all the quakes taken as one big lump.

      We're bumping up against Armageddon right now.

      A good thing too since our masters are whipping us raw-backed.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
    • +1
      coolplanet  

    • Within 15 minutes of posting this story two trolls swooped in and voted everything down with no comment.
      Cowards!
      They are on the Koch Brothers payrole to disrupt discussion about climate change.
      Does this disturb anyone else?

    • 8 months ago
  • crabbyoldguy
    • 0
      crabbyoldguy  
    • coolplanet:

      IMO the article detracts for the "Global Warming" hysteria, citing that warming was a lot worse and there were no humans around to blame it on, thusly no post.

      But a good article none the less.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  
    • crabbyoldguy:

      Climate change is not about blaming humans.
      It's about learning how the atmosphere responds to our presence and preventing a dramatic shift in climate by burning less fossil fuels and maintaining healthy forests.
      Would you or anyone want to return to the sweltering Eocene of 56 million years ago?
      As the article concludes: "Tens of millions of years from now, whatever becomes of humanity, the whole pattern of life on Earth may be radically different from what it otherwise have been--simply because of the way we powered our lives for a few centuries."

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • IceKat
  • squarethecircle
  • IceKat
    • -1
      IceKat  
    • coolplanet:

      Absolutely, old chap! In tens of millions of years time the poor kids will be wringing their hands in desperation, "if only great great (x a few million) grandma had bought a solar panel things would have been so much better today".

      How can anyone take this crap seriously? Now we're supposed to curb our power usage so that the people in tens of millions of years time will have better weather?
      Is everyone here terminally depressed or is this all some sort of joke?

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • IceKat
    • 0
      IceKat  
    • squarethecircle:

      Did I say that? No.
      Humans will continue to advance, and that will bring about changes in the fuel we use and addressing pollution, along with changing attitudes to other aspects of living.
      Life at the moment isn't 'wrong', just as it wasn't 'wrong' a century ago, or three centuries ago. The development of human civilisation is what it is - enjoy the ride.

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • coolplanet
    • 0
      coolplanet  
    • IceKat:

      I'm talking this year and last year and next year.
      2011 has been the poster child for global warming.
      All over the planet record rains and record droughts and record floods and record fires and record storms and record heat have occured, ALL predicted by climatologists 30 years ago from rising Co2. Deny it all you like but this is a fact.
      I see you as an accomplice to mass murder.

    • 8 months ago
  • crabbyoldguy
    • 0
      crabbyoldguy  
    • coolplanet:

      Not "may be radically different" it will be radically different, nothing we can do will stop the degredation of the earths orbit, or the moon's drift away from us. I'd gladly like to see the last days of earth, just to know how it turns out.

      Research and implement alternative energy sources but don't do it in a maner that puts a burden on the every day guy, such as forcing the price of current energy sources up to to point where no one can afford them just to make the alternative energy sources attractive.

      And don't come up with the next "bubble", carbon trading scheme to generate a new batch of fat cats

      Reducing the population reduces energy demands.

    • 8 months ago
  • IceKat
    • 0
      IceKat  
    • coolplanet:

      2011, the poster child for global warming?
      Strange, because globally, not one day in 2011 was warmer (so far) that 2010.
      In simple terms which I know you'll appreciate: to date, globally, 2011 was cooler than 2010.

      "I see you as an accomplice to mass murder."
      That is an amazingly childish and disgusting assertion, but what else would I expect?

    • 8 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • crabbyoldguy:

      http://newpath4.com

      Imitation Energy would be a nice thing to have. Solar Cooker Energy too, good ol' concentrated sunlight. My energy discoveries have been treated like the plagues Moses put on Egypt...

      So how far into the future do we walk into the Promised Land? There are many secrets on my home page newpath4.com for those willing to hold a shovel a while.

      Most are not, they tire easily. The strong get stronger.

    • 8 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • Gravity_Man
    • 0
      Gravity_Man  
    • squarethecircle:

      You have proof of that or just heresay? Supposition?

      More than likely they learned new Physics principles from him to use to design weapons, not using his actual device. I do not believe they would want to be possessing solid proof they were using his system as it could be used as proof they were keeping it from "our fellow Americans".

      You may have noticed they are very adept at keeping theirselves and all their crony buddies out of prison and they retain their bank accounts filled with stolen taxpayer monies. Such people would not provide easy proof.

      Besides, they would lose the Bragging Rights they die for.

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
    • +2
      coolplanet  

    • CONTINUED:

      The hypothesis is alarming. Methane in the atmosphere warms the Earth over 20 times more per molecule than carbon dioxide does, then after a decade or two, it oxidizes to CO2 and keeps on warming for a long time. Many scientists think just that kind of scenario might occur today: The warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels could trigger a runaway release of methane from the deep sea and the frozen north.
      Koch and Zachos concluded from their data that the PETM had lifted the annual average temperature in the Bighorn Basin by around nine degrees Fahrenheit. That's more than the warming there since the last ice age. It's also a bit more than what climate models predict there for the 21st century—but not more than what they forecast for the centuries to come if humans keep burning fossil fuels. Models also predict severe disruptions in the world's rainfall patterns, even in this century, especially in subtropical regions like the American Southwest. But how to test the models? "You can't wait 100 or 200 years to see what happened," says Swedish geologist Birger Schmitz, who has spent a decade studying PETM rocks in the Spanish Pyrenees. "That's what makes the PETM story so interesting. You have the end result. You can see what did happen."
      What happened in the Bighorn was a wholesale rearrangement of life. Scott Wing, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has been collecting fossil leaves in the Bighorn for 36 summers—more leaves than he'll ever have time to examine as thoroughly as he'd like. Every year at summer's end, as he unpacks box after box of fossils, he tells himself that next year he'll be reasonable and stay in Washington, D.C., to catch up on his cataloging. But come July he's back digging again, hoping, as he puts it, "that lightning will strike."
      A few years ago it did. "I looked for about ten years for a fossil deposit like this," Wing said. We were sitting on a hillside 15 miles south of Highway 16 between Ten Sleep and Worland, west of the Bighorn Mountains, hammering at rocks from a trench dug by Wing's assistants. On distant slopes you could see the neat horizontal stripes of red, interspersed with gray and yellow, that identify that earth as dating from the PETM. Down in the hollow a pump jack seesawed out of earshot; from the top of the hill you could see half a dozen more. In the intermittent silences of our conversation, the only sound was the music of the hammers—muffled thuds, distant resonating pings as from a tuning fork, and crunching as the rocks gave way. When you tapped one persistently enough, it yielded along the plane separating two layers of mud, and sometimes that exposed, like the cream in an Oreo, a leaf preserved so perfectly that with Wing's loupe you could see trails eaten into it by insects 56 million years ago.
      Wing knew immediately when he'd found his first deposit of leaves from the PETM. "Many of the plants I had never seen," he said. The fossils he'd already collected showed that before and after the warming the basin was covered with a dense forest of birch, sycamore, dawn redwoods, palm trees, and evergreens that resembled magnolias. The ground would have been squishy underfoot, in places as swampy as the Atchafalaya or the Okefenokee are today. The Bighorn in both the Paleocene and the Eocene was like northern Florida is now.
      But at the height of the PETM, Wing has found, the landscape morphed into something completely different. It became more seasonally dry and open, like the dry tropical forests of Central America. As the planet warmed, new plant species migrated rapidly into the basin from as far south as the Gulf Coast, a latitudinal distance of nearly a thousand miles. Many were beans—not garden-variety ones, but trees of the same family, similar to modern mimosas. And most had been riddled by bugs.
      Of the hundreds of fossil leaves examined by Wing and his colleague Ellen Currano, of Miami University in Ohio, nearly six in ten have holes or curving channels chewed into them by insects. Maybe the heat had revved up the bugs' metabolism, causing them to eat more and reproduce more. Or maybe the extra carbon dioxide had directly affected the plants; when CO2 is injected into modern greenhouses, the plants grow more, but their protein content is lower, making their leaves less nutritious. The same may have happened in the hothouse world of the PETM—maybe the insects had to eat so much foliage just to fill up.
      Yet the bug-chewed PETM leaves were also much smaller than those of their Paleocene ancestors, because, Wing said, rainfall had dropped by around 40 percent. (When water gets scarcer, plants cut down on water loss by shrinking their leaves.) The drop in rainfall also gave the soil a chance to dry out every year and the iron in it to oxidize and turn rust red. These seasonally dry soils became the broad bands that now stripe the hillsides. Then, at the height of the PETM, the red beds disappeared—not because the climate got wetter overall, Wing said, but because the rains became more concentrated, like monsoons. The rivers in the basin constantly jumped their banks and flooded the countryside, washing away soil before it could deepen.
      In the eastern Pyrenees, Birger Schmitz has found more dramatic evidence of catastrophic flooding during the PETM. He and colleague Victoriano Pujalte, from the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, identified the trademark carbon spike at the base of a rock formation that, though now high in the mountains, probably lay on a coastal plain back then. A field of boulders had been washed out of the budding mountains and tossed onto a vast floodplain that the scientists believe extended over thousands of square miles. Some boulders were two feet across and could have been put there only by exceptionally violent water. Deposited over centuries by channel-jumping rivers, they're like fossil imprints of the energy in the hothouse atmosphere.
      While bean trees were blooming in the Bighorn Basin, Apectodinium was blooming all over the ocean. The species is an extinct form of dinoflagellate—a group of single-celled plankton, some of which today give rise to toxic blooms known as red tides. All dinoflagellates have two flagella that they whip around to propel themselves through the water, a distinctive maneuver that Henk Brinkhuis, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, demonstrated for me one day by folding one arm through his legs, the other around his slightly protruding belly, and flapping both. In the winter Apectodinium cells would retreat into hard cysts that sank to the seafloor. The following spring a flap on each cyst would fly open like a trapdoor—Brinkhuis stuck a finger in his cheek and made a cork-popping sound. The cell would then crawl out and ascend to the sea surface, leaving the empty cyst behind for Brinkhuis and his colleague Appy Sluijs to recognize in sediment samples 56 million years later—its open flap the only clue to a space-alien-like life history. In Brinkhuis's office there is a poster that reads, "Everything I know I learned from Star Trek."

    • 8 months ago
  • coolplanet
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