. For some, that indicated the carbon wasn’t from living sources. “Given the current state of knowledge, it seems likely to be volcanism,” says Marcus Gutjahr, a geochemist at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, who led the 2017 study.
Greenland was rifting away from Europe at the time of the PETM as a mantle plume traveled under the island, priming the 180-kilometer-thick crust above to be pulled apart. Like all volcanism, the process would have released CO. Gernon calculated, however, that the eruptions during the rifting would have only provided one-fifth of the more than 10,000 gigatons of carbon needed to explain the PETM warming.
Evidence of the carbon-rich melt is abundant on either side of the North Atlantic rift, the tectonic division that marks the old boundary between Greenland and Europe, Gernon and his co-authors report in a. In an ocean core collected in 1981, they found volcanic tuffs indicating a sharp increase in volcanism during the PETM.
Kender says Gernon makes a compelling case, but adds the timing is key. The PETM happened in a geological instant, lasting only several thousand years. Meanwhile, the volcanism has not been precisely dated. “Whether it was at the onset, in the middle, or later, we can’t say yet,” Kender says. Gernon’s team says more precise geochemical dating from the ocean core, still unpublished, supports the idea that the lavas they’re studying could be from the onset of the PETM.
very nice terrain only carbon iv oxide can be collected and used in fire extinguishers
...and during the reign of dinosaurs, co2 was ~ six times today's level. High co2 is normal for Earth
Wow someone was using AC's back then on 18 i guess!