It will take millions of years for Earth's plants to fully recover from the impacts of global warming, highlighting the urgent need for climate action now.
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Biogeographic climate sensitivity controls Earth system response to large igneous province carbon degassing
Go to source) Earth and environmental scientists at ETH Zurich led an international team of researchers from the University of Arizona, University of Leeds, CNRS Toulouse, and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in a study on how vegetation responds and evolves in response to major climatic shifts and how such shifts affect Earth’s natural carbon-climate regulation system.
‘#Globalwarming threatens Earth's #vegetation, with ecosystems taking millions of years to fully recover. Protect our planet—act now for a greener, healthier future.’
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Drawing on geochemical analyses of isotopes in sediments, the research team compared the data with a specially designed model, which included a representation of vegetation and its role in regulating the geological climate system. They used the model to test how the Earth system responds to the intense release of carbon from volcanic activity in different scenarios. ![twitter](https://images.medindia.net/icons/news/social/twitter.png)
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Unraveling Earth's Climate History
They studied three significant climatic shifts in geological history, including the Siberian Traps event that caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 252 million years ago. ETH Zurich professor, Taras Gerya points out, “The Siberian Traps event released some 40,000 gigatons (Gt) of carbon over 200,000 years. The resulting increase in global average temperatures between 5 - 10°C caused Earth’s most severe extinction event in the geologic record”.“The recovery of vegetation from the Siberian Traps event took several millions of years and during this time Earth’s carbon-climate regulation system would have been weak and inefficient resulting in long-term climate warming,” explains lead author, Julian Rogger, ETH Zurich.
Researchers found that the severity of such events is determined by how fast emitted carbon can be returned to Earth’s interior – sequestered through silicate mineral weathering or organic carbon production, removing carbon from Earth’s atmosphere.
They also found that the time it takes for the climate to reach a new state of equilibrium depended on how fast vegetation adapted to increasing temperatures. Some species adapted by evolving and others by migrating geographically to cooler regions. However, some geological events were so catastrophic that plant species simply did not have enough time to migrate or adapt to the sustained increase in temperature. The consequences of which left its geochemical mark on climate evolution for thousands, possibly millions, of years.
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“Today, we find ourselves in a major global bioclimatic crisis,” comments Loïc Pellissier, Professor of Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution at ETH Zurich and WSL.
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Reference:
- Biogeographic climate sensitivity controls Earth system response to large igneous province carbon degassing - (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn3450)