For Immediate Release Media Contact: Greg Borzo (312) 665-7106 gborzo@fieldmuseum.org General Information about The Field Museum: (312) 922-9410 Burnt coal from the age of dinosaurs sheds light on today's global warming Field Museum scientist sees dire lesson from 183 million years ago about current levels of fossil-fuel consumption CHICAGO—Studying climate change is incredibly complex, yet retracing climate change and the causes behind those changes is the only way to understand the effects of burning massive amounts of fossil fuels today. Over the course of geological time, the amount of carbon trapped in land and the oceans has waxed and waned. So has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These fluctuations correlate closely with changes in global temperatures. Therefore, studying the flow of carbon between land, water and atmosphere through geological ages can shed light on issues surrounding today’s global warming. New research described in the May 26 issue of Nature provides some missing pieces in the puzzle depicting the global carbon cycle over geological time. During what geologists call “oceanic anoxic events,” it has long been suggested that a large amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by millions of microscopic organisms that dwell in the oceans. They do this by trapping carbon in their bodies. When they die, their bodies rain down to the ocean depths and are buried by sediment, locking away the trapped carbon from the atmosphere for million of years. Scientists believe that during oceanic anoxic events the biological activity or “productivity” of these oceanic organisms is for some reason enhanced. On the other hand, perhaps the number of these oceanic organisms is somehow much greater during OAEs than during normal times. Oceanic anoxic events are extremely unusual in other ways, too. They are often associated with mass extinction among many marine organisms and coincide with periods of intense global warming. Scientists have long debated what causes OAEs. The prevailing theory is that a release of massive amounts of methane into the ocean is the root cause. The methane, in turn, oxidizes creating colossal amounts of carbon dioxide in the ocean and atmosphere, which depletes the oceans of oxygen, warms the planet, and kills off plants and animal species. Continue>>