Widespread Warming Before and Elevated Barium Burial During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum: Evidence for Methane Hydrate Release?

ABSTRACT: Current climate change may induce positive carbon cycle feedbacks that amplify anthropogenic warming on time scales of centuries to millennia. Similar feedbacks might have been active during a phase of carbon cycle perturbation and global warming, termed the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, 56 million years ago). The PETM may help constrain these feedbacks and their sensitivity to warming. We present new high-resolution carbon isotope and sea surface temperature data from Ocean Drilling Program Site 959 in the Equatorial Atlantic. With these and existing data from the New Jersey Shelf and Maud Rise, Southern Ocean, we quantify the lead-lag relation between PETM warming and the carbon input that caused the carbon isotope excursion (CIE). We show ~2 °C of global warming preceded the C

SUBMITTER: Frieling J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6582550 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature