Tipping points caused climate change acceleration in the last Ice Age, according to new research
Reaching environmental tipping points might impact the Earth’s climate, according to new research. The study published in the journal Nature Geoscience showed that in the past, gradual changes in CO2 concentrations led to tipping points that eventually set off temperature spikes of as much as 10 degrees Celsius in just a few decades, according to Inhabitat.
Scientists led by Xu Zhang of the Alfred Wegener Institute concluded that sudden changes in our climate, or Dansgaard-Oeschger events, came from CO2 concentrations that had grown gradually. Previously, researchers had known that temperatures rose due to Greenland ice core samples, but they didn’t know the reason behind this. “With this study, we’ve managed to show for the first time how gradual increases of CO2 triggered rapid warming,” Zhang said.
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The research team drew on a climate model to find how interactions between the atmosphere and ocean currents resulted in the temperature spike of 10 degrees Celsius in Greenland during the last Ice Age. Increased CO2 enhanced Central America trade winds. The eastern Pacific Ocean warmed more than the western Atlantic Ocean, leading moisture to leave the Atlantic, so that the salinity and density of that ocean’s water decreased. All this led to a brusque rise of the circulation pattern of the Atlantic and sudden temperature increases.
“We can’t say for certain whether rising CO2 levels will produce similar effects in the future, because the framework conditions today differ from those in a glacial period,” Geritt Lohmann of the institute and the University of Bremen noted. “That being said, we’ve now confirmed that there have definitely been abrupt climate changes in the Earth’s past that were the result of continually rising CO2 concentrations.
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