Science News Desk – The world is currently grappling with global warming, while the average increase in temperature since the industrial era has been less than 2 degrees percent. But a similar change had come earlier as well. 56 million years ago, our planet (Earth) faced one of the largest and most rapid global warming events in its history. This period is called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) in which the world’s temperature increased by 5 to 8 °C in just 5 thousand years. This is a very short period of time in terms of geological scale. But there are many similarities between the Paytm back then and the global warming of today.
An analysis of deep-water sediments from the Gulf of Mexico, a team led by scientists from the University of Geneva, has found that the event caused catastrophic conditions for land and marine life and increased rainy seasons.PETM and There are many similarities to current global warming, which includes an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Lucas Wimpierre, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva and lead author of the study, explained that the aim of his study was to investigate the impact of these climate changes on sedimentary systems. Under this system come those processes by which troughs are formed, there is accumulation of things on them.
In addition, they also wanted to understand how these changes were able to affect the environment in the deep ocean. The scientists analyzed sediments that were taken from a depth of 8 kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, where North America was located for millions of years. The sediment was deposited by running water. Vimpierre explained that due to cost and other reasons, the team did not go deeper and took sediment samples from shallower depths and with the help of an oil company, they were able to get samples of very good quality. It was surprising to learn from the analysis that the bottom of the sea was first made of a very large layer of clay and on top of that there was a layer of sand.
The researchers thought that more rainfall would have caused more erosion and deposited larger amounts of sand in the oceans. But the samples showed that it was not sand but clay that flowed here earlier. Therefore, this does not indicate that there was an increase in the annual rate of rainfall during this period as scientists had previously assumed. But there was a definite increase in this season and its intensity, which brought a lot of water in the river basins, which caused large amounts of soil to reach the depths of the oceans. Due to this, there was a huge loss of species of the oceans. In this study published in the journal Geology, Vimpierre said that the PETM strongly favors current warming.