From Yale University, where that means that even though Earth 40-50 million years ago had a completely different arrangement of continents and climate, it still somehow will “underscore the potential for increased warmth at Earth’s poles and the associated risk of melting polar ice and rising sea levels”. Note that in this paleoreconstruction below, there is still a southern ice cap.
![SIA3657[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/sia36571.jpg?quality=83)
The PR reads: Parts of ancient Antarctica were as warm as today’s California coast, and polar regions of the southern Pacific Ocean registered 21st-century Florida heat, according to scientists using a new way to measure past temperatures.
The findings, published the week of April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscore the potential for increased warmth at Earth’s poles and the associated risk of melting polar ice and rising sea levels, the researchers said.
Led by scientists at Yale, the study focused on Antarctica during the Eocene epoch, 40-50 million years ago, a period with high concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and consequently a greenhouse climate. Today, Antarctica is year-round one of the coldest places on Earth, and the continent’s interior is the coldest place, with annual average land temperatures far below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
But it wasn’t always that way, and the new measurements can help improve climate models used for predicting future climate, according to co-author Hagit Affek of Yale, associate professor of geology & geophysics.
“Quantifying past temperatures helps us understand the sensitivity of the climate system to greenhouse gases, and especially the amplification of global warming in polar regions,” Affek said.
The paper’s lead author, Peter M.J. Douglas, performed the research as a graduate student in Affek’s Yale laboratory. He is now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. The research team included paleontologists, geochemists, and a climate physicist.
By measuring concentrations of rare isotopes in ancient fossil shells, the scientists found that temperatures in parts of Antarctica reached as high as 17 degrees Celsius (63F) during the Eocene, with an average of 14 degrees Celsius (57F) — similar to the average annual temperature off the coast of California today.
Eocene temperatures in parts of the southern Pacific Ocean measured 22 degrees Centigrade (or about 72F), researchers said — similar to seawater temperatures near Florida today.
Today the average annual South Pacific sea temperature near Antarctica is about 0 degrees Celsius.
These ancient ocean temperatures were not uniformly distributed throughout the Antarctic ocean regions — they were higher on the South Pacific side of Antarctica — and researchers say this finding suggests that ocean currents led to a temperature difference.
“By measuring past temperatures in different parts of Antarctica, this study gives us a clearer perspective of just how warm Antarctica was when the Earth’s atmosphere contained much more CO2 than it does today,” said Douglas. “We now know that it was warm across the continent, but also that some parts were considerably warmer than others. This provides strong evidence that global warming is especially pronounced close to the Earth’s poles. Warming in these regions has significant consequences for climate well beyond the high latitudes due to ocean circulation and melting of polar ice that leads to sea level rise.”
To determine the ancient temperatures, the scientists measured the abundance of two rare isotopes bound to each other in fossil bivalve shells collected by co-author Linda Ivany of Syracuse University at Seymour Island, a small island off the northeast side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The concentration of bonds between carbon-13 and oxygen-18 reflect the temperature in which the shells grew, the researchers said. They combined these results with other geo-thermometers and model simulations.
The new measurement technique is called carbonate clumped isotope thermometry.
“We managed to combine data from a variety of geochemical techniques on past environmental conditions with climate model simulations to learn something new about how the Earth’s climate system works under conditions different from its current state,” Affek said. “This combined result provides a fuller picture than either approach could on its own.”
The paper is titled:
Pronounced zonal heterogeneity in Eocene southern high-latitude sea surface temperatures.
Significance
Reconstructions of ancient high-latitude climates can help to constrain the amplification of global warming in polar environments. Climate models cannot reproduce the elevated high-latitude temperature estimates in the Eocene epoch, possibly indicating problems in simulating polar climate change. Widely divergent near-Antarctic Eocene sea surface temperature (SST) estimates, however, question the evidence for extreme warmth. Our analysis of multiple temperature proxies near the Antarctic Peninsula improves intersite comparisons and indicates a substantial zonal SST gradient between the southwest Pacific and South Atlantic. Simulations of Eocene ocean temperatures imply that the formation of deep water in the southwest Pacific partly accounts for this SST gradient, suggesting that climate models underestimate Eocene SSTs in regions where the thermohaline circulation leads to relatively high temperatures.
Abstract
Paleoclimate studies suggest that increased global warmth during the Eocene epoch was greatly amplified at high latitudes, a state that climate models cannot fully reproduce. However, proxy estimates of Eocene near-Antarctic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have produced widely divergent results at similar latitudes, with SSTs above 20 °C in the southwest Pacific contrasting with SSTs between 5 and 15 °C in the South Atlantic. Validation of this zonal temperature difference has been impeded by uncertainties inherent to the individual paleotemperature proxies applied at these sites. Here, we present multiproxy data from Seymour Island, near the Antarctic Peninsula, that provides well-constrained evidence for annual SSTs of 10–17 °C (1σ SD) during the middle and late Eocene. Comparison of the same paleotemperature proxy at Seymour Island and at the East Tasman Plateau indicate the presence of a large and consistent middle-to-late Eocene SST gradient of ∼7 °C between these two sites located at similar paleolatitudes. Intermediate-complexity climate model simulations suggest that enhanced oceanic heat transport in the South Pacific, driven by deep-water formation in the Ross Sea, was largely responsible for the observed SST gradient. These results indicate that very warm SSTs, in excess of 18 °C, did not extend uniformly across the Eocene southern high latitudes, and suggest that thermohaline circulation may partially control the distribution of high-latitude ocean temperatures in greenhouse climates. The pronounced zonal SST heterogeneity evident in the Eocene cautions against inferring past meridional temperature gradients using spatially limited data within given latitudinal bands.
george e. smith says:
April 22, 2014 at 12:35 pm
But I know a boondoggle when I see one, and criticism of poor judgement, is still ok with me.
I can conceive of no business like corporation, ever wanting to hire anyone, whose specific expertise is the earth, 50 million years ago.
What about an oil and gas company? Like say, Statoil, who funded this particular study.
Shocking that oceanic/atmospheric teleconnections can keep a higher lattitude country warmer than it would otherwise be. And all done without the aid of human influence (that little tidbit about CO2 was added for the funds – the conclusion. SHOCKING I say! Right Northern Europe?
I swear the next orgasm these climate science people have is when they find out that rivers don’t flow uphill.
Oops. Didn’t finish the sentence – the conclusion “tags oceanic circulation patterns at the time to be the likely reason for warmer Antarctic temperatures.”
These papers always start with the answer – CAGW – then look for a question that makes the answer seem plausible and respectable. A futile exercise.
If CO2 global warming is amplified at the poles then why is only the North pole warming while the South pole cools and its sea ice increases? It looks more like a bipolar seesaw (NH warms by stealing ocean heat from the SH which cools).
Hi phlogiston, good query. Simple it is coming into winter here in the Southern hemisphere. And that Antarctica is a land mass unlike the North Pole. Can you remember at primary school we were asked to name the continents in rote. ” Europe, Americas, Australasia, Asia, and Antarctica. The Arctic is not a continent.” That might be a simplistic answer, but it is true.
I tried to find where they explained how CO2 caused continental drift, but I couldn’t. Anyone help?