ECHOES OF THE LAST MIND

ORIGIN: https://www.yourweather.co.uk/news/

A drill core from the Norwegian Sea has provided scientists with near season-by-season insight into a famous ancient warming event, revealing land impacts occurred far faster than previously expected models.

Scientists have reconstructed a rare, high-resolution snapshot of the PETM and have shown land ecosystems have flipped fast after CO2 spiked, with forests giving way within centuries.

Climate change is usually a topic talked about in future tense.

However, recent scientific discoveries have suggested many of the scariest clues sit in the past, hidden within things like mud and microfossils.

This time, researchers have uncovered what happened on earth a massive 56 million years ago after looking closely at seafloor sediments.

What they found was evidence of a moment called Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) – a rapid warming event where global temperatures rose by about five degrees.

And because the Earth was already warm, there were loads of vegetation even at high latitudes, storing carbon in forests that wouldn’t look out of place in a nature documentary.

Sediment layers, season by season

One of the leading scientists of the study, PhD researcher