From ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE and the “adjusting the past” department:
The oceans were colder than we thought
A team of EPFL and European researchers has discovered a flaw in the way past ocean temperatures have been estimated up to now. Their findings could mean that the current period of climate change is unparalleled over the last 100 million years.
According to the methodology widely used by the scientific community, the temperature of the ocean depths and that of the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than current readings. This approach, however, is now being challenged: ocean temperatures may in fact have remained relatively stable throughout this period, which raises serious concerns about current levels of climate change. These are the conclusions of a study conducted by a team of French researchers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Sorbonne University and the University of Strasbourg, and Swiss researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Lausanne. The study has just been published in Nature Communications.
“If we are right, our study challenges decades of paleoclimate research,” says Anders Meibom, the head of EPFL’s Laboratory for Biological Geochemistry and a professor at the University of Lausanne. Meibom is categorical: “Oceans cover 70% of our planet. They play a key role in the earth’s climate. Knowing the extent to which their temperatures have varied over geological time is crucial if we are to gain a fuller understanding of how they behave and to predict the consequences of current climate change more accurately.”
How could the existing methodology be so flawed? The study’s authors believe that the influence of certain processes was overlooked. For over 50 years, the scientific community based its estimates on what they learned from foraminifera, which are the fossils of tiny marine organisms found in sediment cores taken from the ocean floor. The foraminifera form calcareous shells called tests in which the content of oxygen-18 depends on the temperature of the water in which they live. Changes in the ocean’s temperature over time were therefore calculated on the basis of the oxygen-18 content of the fossil foraminifera tests found in the sediment. According to these measurements, the ocean’s temperature has fallen by 15 degrees over the past 100 million years.
Yet all these estimates are based on the principle that the oxygen-18 content of the foraminifera tests remained constant while the fossils were lodged in the sediment. Indeed, until now, nothing indicated otherwise: no change is visible to the naked eye or under the microscope. To test their hypothesis, the authors of this latest study exposed these tiny organisms to high temperatures in artificial sea water that contained only oxygen-18. Using a NanoSIMS (nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometer), an instrument used to run very small-scale chemical analyses, they then observed the incorporation of oxygen-18 in the calcareous shells. The results show that the level of oxygen-18 present in the foraminifera tests can in fact change without leaving a visible trace, thereby challenging the reliability of their use as a thermometer: “What appeared to be perfectly preserved fossils are in fact not. This means that the paleotemperature estimates made up to now are incorrect,” says Sylvain Bernard, a CNRS researcher at the Paris-based Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry and the study’s lead author.
For the French and Swiss team of researchers, rather than showing a gradual decline in ocean temperatures over the past 100 million years, these measurements simply reflect the change in oxygen-18 content in the fossil foraminifera tests. And this change appears to be the result of a process called re-equilibration: during sedimentation, temperatures rise by 20 to 30°C, causing the foraminifera tests to re-equilibrate with the surrounding water. Over the course of some ten million years, this process has a significant impact on paleotemperature estimates, especially those based on foraminifera that lived in cold water. Computer simulations run by the researchers suggest that paleotemperatures in the ocean depths and at the surface of the polar ocean have been overestimated.
For Meibom, the next steps are clear: “To revisit the ocean’s paleotemperatures now, we need to carefully quantify this re-equilibration, which has been overlooked for too long. For that, we have to work on other types of marine organisms so that we clearly understand what took place in the sediment over geological time.” The article’s authors are already hard at work.
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This study was conducted by a consortium of researchers from the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry (IMPMC – Sorbonne University, CNRS, the French National Museum of Natural History, and the Pierre and Marie Curie University), the Laboratory of Hydrology and Geochemistry of Strasbourg (LHyGeS – School and Observatory of Earth Sciences, CNRS and the University of Strasbourg) and the Laboratory for Biological Geochemistry (LGB – EPFL and the University of Lausanne).
Reference
Bernard S., Daval D., Ackerer P., Pont S., Meibom A., “Burial-induced oxygen-isotope re-equilibration of fossil foraminifera explains ocean paleotemperature paradoxes“, Nature Communications, 26 October 2017.
Hey, I can make ice melt, too! All I have to do is heat water, make hot tea and dump ice cubes into it. Voila! Melted ice and warm water instead of hot. What?!?!? It’s my kitchen. I can do what I want to.
Did these people take into account axis wobble? Angle of the sun reaching the surface? Quakes? Volcanoes? Humidity levels? Currents shifting course? Tectonic plate movements? Magnetic polar shifts? The occasional very large bolide smack-down?
This study is another money grab, nothing else. My cynical me says “Don’t give them any more money unless they can provide something besides twaddle and guesswork.” But that’s just me, watching my tax money dribble away into nothing.
I know i sound cynical, but we humans weren’t even around for the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming sequence in this nonsensical money grubbing study.
I see no purpose in this study beyond ‘gimme some money!’ It proves nothing of any use to anyone at all. You guys can argue charts, graphs and data points all you want to but you obviously don’t know when you’re being hosed. And this is one of those times.
Ridiculous, useless nonsense that proves nothing has become the order of the day.
Funny how when they find these ‘errors’ they always favor the climate alarmist approach.
Never play poker with anybody that ‘lucky’
The era of flexible models “Plasticine”.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems their experiment has a glaring flaw. Per the article: “To test their hypothesis, the authors of this latest study exposed these tiny organisms to high temperatures in artificial sea water that contained only oxygen-18.”
The actual fossils that were originally used as a proxy, however, were buried in sediment, and never exposed to high temperatures, nor an environment with 100% oxygen-18. In fact, once buried, they’d experience almost no change whatsoever. So it’s perfectly plausible to theorize that the proxy fossil oxygen-18 content wouldn’t have changed, and if it did, it would be such a minuscule change that it would be negligible.
“According to the methodology widely used by the scientific community, the temperature of the ocean depths and that of the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than current readings.”
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Now we have had our joke for the day can normal service please return?
“According to the methodology widely used by the scientific community, the temperature of the ocean depths and that of the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than current readings.”
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Now we have had our joke for the day can normal service please return?
The temperature of the surface of the Arctic Ocean is fairly constant, near the freezing point of seawater. Because it consists of saltwater, its temperature must reach −1.8 °C (28.8 °F) before freezing occurs.
So, when seas were at their warmest during the Cretaceous Period, the paleo-Arctic Ocean would have been about 13 °C (55.4 °F), if 15 degrees warmer than now. This is entirely possible. The temperature of the North Pacific Ocean at the Columbia River Lightship is currently ~55 °F.
Gabro I read part of the comment as being the ocean depths were 15 C higher. Due to the lack of penetration of sunlight the depths are as low as – 2.8C in some places despite the warming effect of pressure.
There is no way that the amount of energy from the sun at our distance(s) from the sun could ever heat the water down there up by 15C.
Think of the deep pacific and the Arctic, wildly different surface temp including a lot hotter than 15C in the Pacific and yet the same coldness at depth.
The concept is totally unscientific as expresssed.
“According to the methodology widely used by the scientific community, the temperature of the ocean depths and that of the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than current readings.”
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Now we have had our joke for the day can normal service please return?
Stop complaining! The colder it was in the past the warmer it is today and the more we save on the heating bill.
Guess they must have found a bunch of argosauraus fossils to be so sure.
Or maybe a tree ring fossil?
I’m petrified at the implications!
PS For the authors, keep learning and researching, but don’t decide beforehand what you are going to find.
PPS How did all those marine “mega-reptiles” survive in such cold waters? They chewed their prey veerrryyyy slowly?
This statement is simply preposterous:
“A team of EPFL and European researchers has discovered a flaw in the way past ocean temperatures have been estimated up to now. Their findings could mean that the current period of climate change is unparalleled over the last 100 million years.”
It’s ludicrous to imagine that the Arctic Ocean is warmer now than 100 Ma. Modern marine reptiles can tolerate some surprisingly chilly water, but obviously not anywhere near freezing.
Some sea snakes and sea turtles do live outside the tropics, unlike saltwater crocodiles. Leatherback sea turtles even ride the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift to Scandinavia. But outside the warm heart of the Drift, they do not venture. In the Cretaceous, relatives of the leatherback were giants.
The largest Archelon fossil, found in the Pierre Shale (80.5 Ma) of South Dakota in the 1970s, measures more than 13 feet long, and about 16 feet wide from flipper to flipper.
You had to be big to survive in the mosasaur-infested Interior Seaway.
Are they making up more normals?
To retain the A in AGW it will have to be tweeked some more until it lines up with emissions
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3033001
Used Car Salesmen > Used Scare Scientists
Two strong conclusions from the report on the paper and on some of the comments above.
1. Authors of climate papers should classify conclusions as interim pending independent confirmation. Do not rush to print when a lot of expensive policy can arise from your speculations.
2. Again I note that the presence of uncertainty estimates based on proper, formal procedures would help prevent publication of guesswork dressed up as science. It is ludicrous to propose high accuracy for the procedures in this paper with sampling, drift, low-level detection problems (true error unspecified) let alone assumption such as a ubiquitous firm link between temperature and isotope ratios.
Only in climate science do we see such gay abandon of long-held scientific principles as replication and statement of true error estimates.
I won’t be around in 20 years from now to laugh at the naivete of the climate science of today. Young scientists, instead of being suckered into belief, should be collecting examples of the worst climate papers for lampooning in the future. There is plenty on offer. Geoff
Now can we get back to bashing the reliability of ice core records, in regards to ancient CO2 levels?
Surely, the above paper sets a precedent for questioning all long-standing, established analytic techniques.
If you don’t like what you see, then claim that the tradition is flawed, announce prematurely that you know this to be true, claim further research is needed, and then proceed to write your next grant proposal to get funding to do said research.
This is a how-to course in engineering gravy trains.
As Bob Illis points out, the issue this paper raises is well known in paleoclimatological circles.
The paper in no way can possibly be construed to argue that oceans 100 Ma were as cold as now. It is preposterous, ludicrous and ridiculous, at best, so to suggest.
I agree, Gabro. If one proxiy is seemingly giving aberrant results, one should check it against other proxies for climate, like faunal or vegetation fossils, for the same area. it is the minor little fact that what the Norse were able to grow in Greenland when they settled that makes me conclude that some estimates of the climate in the Medieval Warm were rather off.
Mann, et al, tried to overturn all the evidence for the Medieval WP in a single graph based upon inappropriate proxies and patently false statistical techniques, with bogus “thermometer” “data” grafted onto the inappropriate and misanalyzed proxy “data’. That’s what passes for “climate science” in these benighted times.
That mid-Cretaceous seas were hot, hot, hot is about as robust a paleoclimatological result as can be found.
“Settled science” illusionists can burst their own average global outside air temperature certainty bubble any time. And that’s exactly what this study did now – now the magnitude of error margin is official. And when the past is so unsettled, so is their science. It is logical their model projections are all over the place and equally unsuitable for policy decisions other than concluding the magnitude of their budget cuts.
With both the atmosphere and ocean temperatures being claimed as being at record highs, is there a chart available that tells us what the past temperatures were in the past, what the past temperature are in the present and what the past temperatures will be in the future.
…he said with tongue planted firmly in cheek!
Frankly, I don’t give a damn. The ocean temperature was, is and always will be what it is. Nothing we can do about it. For my purposes, the ocean is too damn cold anywhere north of San Diego. I have never experienced ocean that is too warm.
Try Magnetic Island, it is like having a tepid bath. Yo feel worse coming out than you did going in.
I swam at Magnetic Island in 1971. Can’t remember the temperature but tepid sounds good to me.
The gulf down around Brownsville TX is generally pretty mild
How can YOU make any comparison to modern temperatures . That is just ludicrous! The research does not.
More than 9Myears ago currents would be different – south America was not joined to North america. Totally different conditions!
You cannot link modern temperatures to a 100Myear ago world where continents were not in the same general area – ridiculous.
Methods of estimating temperatures of oceans at that time may be valid. But do not try to link climate then to climate now
How can anyone? Due to the sheer number of unknown variables in the past, anyone claiming “increased certainty” over “unprecedented change” now is either ignorant or worse.
During the past 540 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, oceans have rarely been colder than now.
They were at or close to their hottest 100 Ma during the mid-Cretaceous.
Mann merely erased the KIA and NOW.
These folks are erasing global ice ages in order to promote climate hysterua.
MWP and LIA…..
I do hate autofill….lol
Moderator: Temperature is spelled wrong in the title of the article.
(Fixed) MOD
This story is starting to get wider mainstream exposure: http://www.newsweek.com/ancient-ocean-temperatures-wrong-unparalleled-climate-change-694434?yptr=yahoo
Are they really concerned about what ocean temperatures were 100 million years ago?
Article According to the methodology widely used by the scientific community, the temperature of the ocean depths and that of the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than current readings.
Gabro October 26, 2017 at 3:19 pm The temperature of the surface of the Arctic Ocean is fairly constant, near the freezing point of seawater. Because it consists of saltwater, its temperature must reach −1.8 °C (28.8 °F) before freezing occurs. So, when seas were at their warmest during the Cretaceous Period, the paleo-Arctic Ocean would have been about 13 °C (55.4 °F), if 15 degrees warmer than now. This is entirely possible.
Angech Gabro I read part of the comment as being the ocean depths were 15 C higher. Due to the lack of penetration of sunlight the depths are as low as – 2.8C in some places despite the warming effect of pressure.There is no way that the amount of energy from the sun at our distance(s) from the sun could ever heat the water down there up by 15C. Think of the deep pacific and the Arctic, wildly different surface temp including a lot hotter than 15C in the Pacific and yet the same coldness at depth.
The concept is totally unscientific as expresssed.
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If the paper expressed a view that the Arctic, polar] ocean depths were 15 C [or F] degrees warmer at any stage in the last 3 billion years [except over volcanic vents] they are sadly and scientifically mistaken.
It is Impossible.
big word.
Impossible.
Think about how deep it is under the pole!!
and how cold.
You would have a thermocline at the top then cold.
cold.
cold.
I don’t know about the ocean depths, but most forams (amoeboid protists, commonly shelled and marine) do live in seafloor sediments, while some float in the water column.
However the surface of the polar ocean 100 million years ago might well have been around 15 degrees higher than current reading, which is what the authors of this study challenge. The evidence is overwhelming that mid-Cretaceous seas at all latitudes were hotter than now, but especially so near the poles.
“The evidence is overwhelming that mid-Cretaceous seas at all latitudes were hotter than now, but especially so near the poles.”
Agreed.
The study bases its conclusion on this piece of scientific wizardry.
” this change appears to be the result of a process called re-equilibration: during sedimentation, temperatures rise by 20 to 30°C, causing the foraminifera tests to re-equilibrate with the surrounding water.”
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Sedimentation is a cold process at the bottom of the ocean floor where the temperature can get down to as low as -2.8 C.
Very hard to see how at depth other than over a volcano vent or a shallow tropical ocean [not the case here] any sediment could ever get to 0 degrees at the North Pole.
No problem with a warm surface polar sea, just impossible to have a warm deep sea or ocean.