Title: The Carbon Cycle as the Main Determinant of Glacial-Interglacial Periods Author: Diego Jiménez de la Cuesta, René Garduño, Darío Núñez, Beatriz Rumbos, Carlos Vergara-Cervantes
An intriguing problem in climate science is the existence of Earth's glacial cycle. We show that it is possible to generate these periodic changes in climate by means of the Earth's carbon cycle as the main source factor. The carbon exchange between the Ocean, the Continent and the Atmosphere is modelled by means of a Lotka-Volterra three species system and the resulting atmospheric carbon cycle is used as the unique radiative forcing mechanism. It is shown that the carbon dioxide and temperature paths that are thus obtained have the same qualitative structure as the 100 kyr glacial-interglacial cycles depicted by the Vostok ice core data, reproducing the asymmetries of rapid heating--slow cooling, and short interglacial--long glacial ages.
New Coral Dating Method Hints at Possible Future Sea-Level Changes
New evidence of sea-level oscillations during a warm period that started about 125,000 years ago raises the possibility of a similar scenario if the planet continues its more recent warming trend, says a research team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). In a paper published online in the Sept. 11 Nature Geoscience, the researchers report data from an improved method of dating fossil coral reef skeletons in the Bahamas. By calculating more accurate ages for the coral samples than previously possible, they found that sea levels were considerably less stable than earlier believed--oscillating up and down by 4 to 6 meters over a few thousand years about 120,000 years ago during a period known as the Last Interglacial. Read more