According to new research, the Earth can control its own temperature over millennia.
The “stabilizing feedback” on 100,000-year timeframes that regulates global temperatures has been established by scientists.
The Earth’s climate has changed significantly due to a number of factors, including solar radiation fluctuations, ice ages that cooled the planet, and global volcanism. Yet life has persisted for the past 3.7 billion years.
A “stabilizing feedback” process that functions over hundreds of thousands of years to bring the climate back from the edge and maintain global temperatures within a constant, habitable range has now been confirmed by new research by MIT scientists. On November 16, the study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.
On the one hand, it’s advantageous since we are aware that this stabilizing feedback will eventually cancel out the current global warming. On the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to occur, making it too slow to address our immediate problems. — Constantine Arnscheidt
How does Earth manage to do this? Silicate weathering, a geological process through which the gradual weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that eventually suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks, is one possible explanation.
Researchers have long held the suspicion that weathering of silicate plays a significant part in controlling the Earth’s carbon cycle. Silicate weathering’s mechanism might act as a geologically constant factor to control carbon dioxide levels and world temperatures. But up until now, there has never been concrete proof of the ongoing operation of such a feedback mechanism.
Based on an examination of paleoclimate data that document variations in average global temperatures over the previous 66 million years, the new conclusions were made. In order to determine whether the data showed any patterns resembling stabilizing phenomena that controlled world temperatures on a geologic timescale, the MIT team conducted a mathematical study.
