Ancient Arctic Water Cycles Are Red Flags to Future Global Warming
Ancient plant remains recovered in recent Arctic Ocean sampling cores shows that during a period of carbon dioxide-induced global warming, humidity, precipitation and salinity of the ocean water altered drastically, along with elevated global and regional temperatures, according to a report in a recent issue of Nature.
The Arctic Ocean drilling expedition in 2004 allowed scientists to directly measure samples of biological and geological material from the beginning of the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), a period of rapid, extreme global warming about 55 million years ago. It has given researchers a direct resource of measurable information on global warming - from a time when the overall global temperature was higher and more uniform from the subtropics to the arctic.