Brief outline of the project
Four climate states—Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse have existed in Earth history. Investigating paleoclimate records from past Warmhouse and Hothouse intervals can offer predictive insights into future climate change. Extreme global warming events, known as hyper thermals, provide potential analogues for modern warming. These events offer the potential to better understand the forcing(s), responses and feedbacks of the Earth’s climate system. However, the mechanisms that drive these hyper thermals are heavily debated and not fully understood. Studying hyper thermals can test the limits and ground-truth the best available climate models, and thus test how the future climate system will behave in response to continuing CO2 emissions.
This project will address these issues by investigating major hyper thermals and the associated environmental and biological responses of the last 300 million years; events that were associated with rapid global warming, extinction, and extreme changes in global weathering.
Related information
- duration: 2021 - 2025
- Global change theme
Contact
- Xiumian Hu (China)
- email: huxm@nju.edu.cn