UF research gives clues about carbon dioxide patterns at end of Ice Age
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New University of Florida research puts to rest the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period. It turns out it ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.
The findings have implications for modern-day global warming, said Ellen Martin, a UF geological sciences professor and an author of the paper, which is published in this week’s journal Nature Geoscience.
“It helps us understand how the carbon cycle works, which is important for understanding future global warming scenarios,” she said. “Ultimately, a lot of the carbon dioxide that we’re pumping into the atmosphere is going to end up in the ocean. By understanding where that carbon was stored in the past and the pathways it took, we develop a better understanding of how much atmospheric carbon dioxide the oceans can absorb in the future.”
Scientists know that during the transition from the last glacial period to the current inter-glacial period about 14,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels rose very quickly at the same time that the age of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell, as measured by radiocarbon data. That suggests carbon dioxide had been stored in the ocean and suddenly released, she said.
One idea holds that it was building up in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, where extensive sea ice on the surface of the ocean initially prevented the exchange of gasses into the atmosphere, Martin said. The other possibility is that the same process occurred in the Northern Hemisphere with ice sheets in the North Pacific Ocean, she said.
In her lab, Martin and lead author Chandranath Basak, a UF graduate student in geological sciences; Keiji Horikawa, a UF postdoctoral fellow in geological sciences; and Thomas Marchitto, a University of Colorado geology professor, studied that question by using a technique to measure isotopes of neodymium, a rare earth element not commonly found in marine sediments but preserved in microscopic fossil fish teeth. The isotopic signature of a water mass, which is captured in the fish teeth, reflects the location where the water mass came from, she said.
“It’s essentially what we call a water mass tracer,” Martin said. “You can tell where the water masses have formed and where they have moved to by using this tracer.”
The researchers took samples that had been shown to have old carbon in them and measured the neodymium isotopes on fish teeth from the sediments to see if they could reconstruct whether they had come from the North Pacific or the Southern Ocean, she said.
“When we did this, we got a signal that looks very much like the Southern Ocean,” she said. “It implies that all the carbon was being stored in the Southern Hemisphere and as the ice sheet melted back, it released that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing part of the big increase in carbon dioxide and introducing old carbon back into the atmosphere.”
By giving information about environmental conditions during the last glacial period, the research findings can help scientists to reconstruct what the world was like at that time, she said.
The implications are that while large amounts of carbon could be stored in the ocean when there was a great deal of sea ice, the opposite is the case in a world that is warming, with less ice, which allows more carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere, Martin said. Thus, in a warming scenario the oceans may not be able to store as much carbon dioxide as they could under glacial conditions
The oceans are a critical part of the carbon dioxide cycle, Martin said. “The oceans have 60 times more carbon dioxide in them than the atmosphere, so when we worry about what’s happening with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we often look to the oceans as a potential source or sink.”
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the glacial periods was about 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million during a typical interglacial period, Martin said. Today that level has soared to about 380 parts per million, she said.
The time period that encompasses the last glacial period to the current interglacial period when carbon dioxide levels went up very quickly is often referred to as the “mystery interval” because scientists hadn’t known where the carbon was stored, Martin said.
“Now we have a better understanding of how the system worked,” she said.
One wonders how the sea life down there tolerated all that extra carbon resulting in “ocean acidification”.
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Seems the young ones has discovered old physical laws. So warmer ocean release CO2.
Good. Hopefully they dont believe more CO2 makes it warmer, which release more CO2. Because then you have an unstable situation.
Historical data contradicts such an unstable situation.
We wouldn’t be here if that was the case.
weather forecast from GFS,
http://www.theweatherland.com/
rational debate says:
October 25, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Reckon you are onto something here… this Deniers are from Mars, Believers are from Venus debate has been going on for long enough… can we please settle the science once and for all.
I think I read somewhere that during the time of the dinosoars, CO2 was several thousand ppm. If that was the case, what is so remarkable about a lousy 380ppm.
This is why AGW alarmists are now trying to find a ‘middle ground’ of lower temperature increases but solid CO2=warming ‘science’. Once the ‘science’ is accepted there will be a starters pistol for releasing articles like this promoting new positive feedback concerns, once agin suggetsing high temeperature increases and putting CAGW back on the map.
To R. Gates :
October 25, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Please tell me by what kind of mechanism the death spiral of CO2 and temperature has turned again and again into the opposite direction in history.
Glassman and Segalstadt understand the CO2 oceanic cycle perfectly well… and have therefore been marginalized. It’s so simple. As Akasofu shows, overall warming has been steadily continuing since 1850 or so… so naturally the oceans’ deep outgassing of CO2 lags… and with the inertia, rises very steadily… with local spikes for the differences between summer and winter caused by both vegetation and ocean surfaces… the whole natural flux is vastly bigger than our contribution.
See my notes and Glassman’s page. His picture should be one of the first icons anyone ever learns if they want to study the CO2 cycle, IMHO.
rbateman says:
The Earth managed to keep its tectonic and volcanic mechanisms going to replenish the early scouring from Solar Wind.
This would not be happening thanks to rotation.
Our planet compressed and stored a vast supply of energy that is constantly being released due to planetary slowdown. If a crust had not formed, centrifugal force would have kept disintergrating this planet, such as how the moon was formed. In pealing a piece of mass off, it rotated opposite to this planet but didn’t have the vast amount of gases stored that our planet has.
Compressing mass and gases and storing and releasing energy is very easy to show by using a string, a weight and a lightly compressible coil spring.
I would like to see a nice, simple calculation of how much more CO2 the ocean would hold if the average temperatures of all the waters dropped .05 degrees. Call it “anti-degassing.”
Then do a comparison of this calculation with reality. When the sea’s temperatures rise .05 degree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere should rise X amount, and then decrease by the same X amount when the seas temperatures fall by .05 degree.
The place where “degassing” and “anti-degassing” would occur is where the atmosphere is in contact with the sea. Therefore SST ought be most important.
When an El Nino shifts to a La Nina, and a “warm” PDO turns “cold,” and later when the “warm” AMO turns “cold,” some sort of blip ought appear in the Mauna Loa CO2 record.
I haven’t seen any sign of such blips.
mutantjedi says:
October 25, 2010 at 10:14 pm
The R. Gates comment…
In order for his scenario to work, you have to accept that 1) a little change in atmospheric CO2 can have a large effect on water vapor concentration which has a large effect on temperature, and 2) while not stated directly by R. Gates, when the astronomical or other natural trigger to the initial warming is removed, the absence trigger’s contribution to the warming, while not enough to account for the subsequent warming after the introduction of the trigger, is enough to overpower the positive feedback contribution of the CO2/Water system.
Yes, it is very much like having your cake and eating it too.
I would like to go further. All the periods of global warming have occured when CO2 has been low and all the periods of global cooling have occured when CO2 has been high. The logical conclusion is that CO2 has, most likely, a cooling effect!
However what is most likely is not always true. It is possible that the effect is a warming one but, as the above post points out, it must be small compared with the original astronomical driver. Perhaps more significantly it must also saturate before it reaches around 400 ppm, since it does not lead to continued warming at these levels and, in fact, it was at these levels when each period of rapid global cooling began.
As far as we know there is no effect that drives cooling on a regular basis so one has to assume that the natural state of the earth is one of ice age. Whatever causes the interglacial period is powerful but transient and we should enjoy it while we can. It would be nice to think that releasing CO2 might help us stave off the inevitable but all the evidence is that any warming effect is too puny to do so.
One wonders how the sea life down there tolerated all that extra carbon resulting in “ocean acidification”.
Further to this showing increased shell thickness:
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=63809&ct=162
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;320/5874/336
There is also this just out:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11511624
Does this not present problems for ocean acidification theory?
docattheautopsy says:
October 25, 2010 at 7:31 pm
“… Since we’re all eating carbon, and essentially we get carbon from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2, we continuously pass carbon through us, so there’s an equilibrium amount of carbon in us, sustained by us eating and passing carbon from our system…”
I read that and thought: equilibrium … only for adults who never gain weight, surely? And then I thought: we should all have lots of children, and all get as fat as possible, thereby sequestering the evil carbon from the atmosphere by constantly growing … overpopulation and obesity are desirable elements in short term (it only works up to death, obviously) combatting of CO2-driven climate change … can I get a grant to study this?
so measuring a rare earth metal in fish teeth tells us how much CO2 was held in the Antarctic Ocean 14,000 years ago … really ???
Couldn’t they just use some bristlecone pine trees and just make sh*t up like Mann ?
How is this any different ?
I call proxy BS on this nonsense …
This is a guess based on starting with a theory and cherry picking data that supports said theory …
couldn’t they just go measure the actual CO2 levels under the Antarctic sea ice today ?
Oh, right … no field work …
Will Crump says:
October 25, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Are you allowed to drink at your age?
Grey Lensman, you are such a sceptic,
here is a couple news releases for papers you may be interested in.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080402202055.htm
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Venus_Express/SEMGK373R8F_0.html
But again, radiation emitting from an object increasing with the fourth power of temperature is what leads to stopping of the runaway from the positive feedbacks.
That’s the work of Max Planck
James Sexton (October 25, 2010 at 4:49 pm):
“Can someone relate a gton of CO2 to ppm?”
Here are two back-of-the envelope methods:
From the IPCC’s AR4, “net [atmospheric] uptake of CO2 of approximately 3.3 GtC [per year]”, where GtC = 1 gigatonne of carbon = 10^9 metric tons. Because a molecule of CO2 contains approx. 12 parts by weight of carbon for every (12 + 2*16)=44 parts total weight, 1 GtC = 3.7 Gt CO2. So 3.3 GtC /yr from IPCC becomes 12 GtCO2 /yr, assuming all of the atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO2 — this ignores methane, for example, but that’s measured in parts per billion rather than parts per million. To convert to ppmv, we can compare the 12 Gt CO2 / yr rate to the change in CO2 concentrations in the Keeling curve, which is about 1.5 ppmv / yr currently.
As 12 Gt CO2 / yr corresponds to 1.5 ppmv /yr, each Gt CO2 is equivalent to 1/8 ppmv.
As an alternative method, one can look up the atmospheric weight as 5 x 10^18 kg, or 5 x 10^6 Pg. (1 Pg = 10^15 g is the same as 1 Gt.) So 1 Pg CO2 is about 0.2 ppm by weight. However, the concentrations are typically expressed in ppm by volume (ppmv), so a conversion is necessary. According to the ideal gas law, volume is proportional to number of moles of a gas (holding temperature and pressure constant), so let’s convert to moles. Average atmospheric molecular weight is about (80% x 28 + 20% x 32), using the molecular weights and concentrations for N2 and O2 respectively; this comes out to 28.8. [This is a rather crude approximation, but it will do for the purpose.] By mole ratio, 1 Pg CO2, at a molecular weight of 44, is
(1 Pg CO2 / 44 g/mole ) / (5×10^6 Pg atm / 28.8 g/mole) = .13 ppm. If CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere, the mole ratio is equal to the ratio by volume; that is, one can replace ppm with ppmv.
This Ellen Eckels sure knows how to get mileage out of fish teeth! Apparently in 2006 she has also proved when the Drake passage opened with fish teeth as well! From Underwater times.com news service April 20, 2006 15:42 est “Gainsville, Florida –Ancient fish teeth are yielding clues about when Antarctica became the icy continent it is today, highlighting how ocean currents affect climate change”. Here comes the juicy bit, ” Scientists have long puzzled over the rapid cooling that seemed to sweep over Antarctica more than 30 million years ago, replacing boreal pine forests with ice and snow. The cooling occurred in a very warm era when levels of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for the greenhouse warming effect, were three to four times today’s levels”. Huh? Say what? So Co2 was between 1140ppm and 1520ppm and there was a “rapid cooling” ? So we can go INTO to an ice age with 1140ppm – 1520ppm in the atmosphere and we now have 380ppm????? But wait this article states That ” The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the glacial periods was about 200 parts per million, compared with 280 parts per million during a typical interglacial period, Martin said. Today that level has soared to about 380 parts per million, she said. Notice the use of the word “soared”. The 200ppm IS obviously ridiculous and made up. Such contradictions. This article is nothing but an AGW inspired pseudoscientific mess designed to convince under a cloud of confusion. Pure crap! Its even crap on crap.
Zeke the Sneak says:
October 25, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Magnetite grains were found at the nasal bones, years ago by an English anthropologist, who analyzed hundreds of female and male skulls, finding that men’s facial bones had much more iron than women (That’s women usually give wrong directions 🙂 )
As you know, M.Vukcevic has shown the relation between the Z vector of the magnetic field and temperatures:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GeoMagField.gif
BTW: In Spanish a magnet is called a IMAN (pron.: eemahn), and the Islam tradition tells that there were two Imams guarding the Qubt (the cube or Kahbah), one to the right and one to the left (I wonder if these two guys were called Magnetism and Electricity 🙂 )
“”” Chuck says:
October 25, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Well done.
That which was proved is proved.again.
The Polar Region ice caps and glaciers are the Earth’s freezers.
Simple! Simple! Simple!. “””
Well not so simple; Those polar ice caps and glaciers are there BECAUSE it is cold there; they are not the CAUSE of it being cold there; they are the RESULT of it being cold there.
tallbloke says:
October 25, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Interesting. Neodymium is the stuff the Chinese make superstrong magnets from. I wonder if fish use it for navigational purposes.
Yes that is another kettle of fish. What are all of these magnetic nanocrystals doing in nearly every organism, even those who don’t seem to use any kind of navigation system wrt the geomagnetic field of the earth?
http://elements.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/235
Biomineralization of magnetite crystals has even been found to be occuring in the human brain.
http://www.pnas.org/content/89/16/7683.abstract
“elemental analyses identify minerals in the magnetite-maghemite family, with many of the crystal morphologies and structures resembling strongly those precipitated by magnetotactic bacteria and fish. These magnetic and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy measurements imply the presence of a minimum of 5 million single-domain crystals per gram for most tissues in the brain and greater than 100 million crystals per gram for pia and dura.”
Perhaps “much further research is required to understand fully the origin and function of biomagnetism.”
Thanks Zeke, more interesting. My dad, who is a pretty level headed octogenarian tells me of the water diviner he used to employ from time to time to find underground pipes during his long career as a water engineer. He says the guy used to get a strong physical reaction when he crossed the pipeline, and from weakening waves of the same reaction as he moved further from it, could also estimate the depth at which it was buried. Dad assures me he was usually right to within 18 inches.
Brian W,
During an ice age the oceans are, by definition, pretty cold and therefore, as the biggest sinks of CO2, they do not outgas it as they do when they are warm.
Some research suggests there was a ‘CO2 burp’ that helped bring an end to the last ice age because the oceans were starting to warm up.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100527141959.htm
re:
kuhnkat, you miss my point entirely, unfortunately – it had nothing to do with water per se. The point is that claims were being made about mechanisms, events, and the physical conditions on Venus that we quite simply have no way to know at this point in time. The point was that all sorts of claims have been made in the past and proven incorrect – with a few quite recent examples of water on the moon and mars. Those were issues that science had ‘settled’ long ago and had been taken as almost without question to be factual and correct, taught in science classes in both high school and college for decades.
Now, with the AGW fad, Venus’s condition is suddenly ‘runaway global warming’ caused by CO2. I’m dating myself, but there used to be absolutely logical reasonable explanations for Venusian conditions that had nothing to do with CO2 caused global warming. To my knowledge, those explanations still hold and the ‘runaway CO2 global warming’ of Venus isn’t any better explanation – and has some necessary base assumptions that we’ve no way to verify or really know occurred.
ROFLMAO!!! Brilliant. Love it!
I’ve just had a thought. Given this outgassing of CO2 from the Southern Ocean, what would the ‘age’ of this CO2 be?
As I understand it, the ‘age’ of CO2 has been used to determine the human component of the current CO2 levels. Does this outgassing distort the calculations that were done, since I believe they were largely based on isotope ratios. If the CO2 being released from the Southern Ocean has an ‘abnormal’ isotope ratio, the calculations to derive the human activity CO2 proportion could be wrong.