Scientists have captured Earth’s climate over the last 485 million years. Here’s the surprising place we stand now.
By Sarah Kaplan, Simon Ducroquet, and Emily J. Judd“ As long as one or two organisms survive, there will always be life. I’m not concerned about that. My concern is what human life looks like. What it means to survive.”
Utilising 150,000 data points from climate proxies, including fossils and statistical methods such as data assimilation, a team of scientists led by Emily J. Judd has produced the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth‘s past temperatures to date. The timeline illustrates the historical temperature fluctuations and the correlation between rapid changes in temperature and mass extinctions. The previous higher temperatures may be misinterpreted as evidence against the current climate debate; however, they demonstrate that humans evolved in an icehouse climate. The unprecedented change in temperature also raises concerns, as it indicates that the average temperature could reach 17 °C, which has not been seen for 5 million years.
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