Imagine an enormous, lush rain forest teeming with life… in the Arctic. Well there was a time – and not too long ago – when the world warmed more than any human has ever seen (so far). Ancient warming took place over the course of just two hundred thousand years, the blink of an eye in geologic time and it ended much like it began suddenly and mysteriously.
It all started 56 million years ago at the very end of the Paleocene epoch when life was still recovering from all the unpleasantness of the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event, which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and things were already warm by today’s standards.
But that was about to change – in fewer than 20,000 years the global average temperature increased by an additional five to eight degrees Celsius.
This remarkable and sudden warming event is known as the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum or PETM and it had a massive effect on life on earth.
One study of marine sediments from the Arctic showed that at the peak of the PETM as much as 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere every year for at least 4,000 years on earth.
The scariest thing? Whilst it took thousands of years to raise the temperate of the earth those five to eight degrees Celsius, now we pump out more CO2 on a faster basis than during the PETM event.
In 2014 alone, it was 9.8 billion metric tons. So not only are we pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere every year, but we’re doing it faster rate than ever before. In the short video below by “PBS Eons” you’ll discover what happened during the PETM and what could be in store for us in the not too distant future. Check it out below…
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