Ancient Global Warming Stunk. No, Literally! (ca. 55,000,000 BC)
It seems that 55 million years ago, some ancient British bogs had a serious case of indigestion. All across the countryside, bogs were releasing large belches of methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas now known to be more powerful than carbon dioxide – and as a result, the bogs probably contributed on a large scale of a period of global warming.
How can modern wetlands reveal clues about global warming from 55 million years ago? Researchers were able to take sediment cores from deep inside several wetland areas in Kent, and measure the internal chemistry of the ancient layers. The organic compound levels that were produced by bacteria were then used to estimate the ancient levels of methane-consuming microbes that lived in the bogs.
The results of the study showed that there were significantly more methane-eating microbes in Kentish wetlands around 55 million years ago than at any other period, and for this to have happened, there must have been an awful lot of methane emissions coming from the bogs themselves. Based on what is already known about ancient climate in this area, the region probably first began to warm up, causing plant material to decay much more rapidly than usual – which, as a result, triggered the increased methane levels and “burps” from Kent’s wetlands.
If Britain’s other wetlands had a similar response to the ones studied from Kent… well, the result would have been catastrophic, with enormous amounts of methane gas being released into the atmosphere, thus causing a rapid acceleration of the global warming process.
Essentially, burping bogs were one of the main factors for a severe period of global warming… and although scientists hope that there is not a repeat of this ancient catastrophe in the future, it might not hurt to invest in a few extra bottles of Febreze, just in case…
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