Merdith, A.S., Gernon, T.M., Maffre, P. et al. (5 more authors) (2025) Phanerozoic icehouse climates as the result of multiple solid-Earth cooling mechanisms. Science Advances, 11 (7). eadm9798. ISSN 2375-2548
Abstract
The Phanerozoic climate has been interrupted by two long “icehouse” intervals, including the current icehouse of the last ~34 million years. While these cool intervals correspond to lower atmospheric CO2, it is unclear why CO2 levels fell, with hypotheses suggesting changes in CO2 degassing rates or modification of silicate weathering through changing continental lithology or paleogeography. Here, we construct an Earth System Model that integrates these proposed cooling mechanisms in detail. The model can reproduce the broad geologic record of ice cap expansion, allowing us to infer the primary drivers of long-term climate change. Our results indicate that recent icehouse climates required a combination of different cooling mechanisms acting simultaneously and were not driven by a single known process, potentially explaining why icehouses have been rarer than greenhouses over Earth history.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Earth Surface Science Institute (ESSI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 893615 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/X011208/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jan 2025 11:08 |
Last Modified: | 06 Mar 2025 10:34 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Association for the Advancement of Science |
Identification Number: | 10.1126/sciadv.adm9798 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:221685 |