Climate of Our Future

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2009) — One of the mysteries of the Earth’s history is the fundamental climate change in the Mid Pliocene, about 3.5-2.5 million years ago. By that time warm climate conditions ended and the ice caps in the northern hemisphere developed. Investigations by marines scientists from Germany and India suggest that changes in the Indonesian throughflow might have been the determining process for this fundamental climate change

The forcing mechanisms initiating the Mid-Pliocene climate change from a „Greenhouse“ to an „Icehouse World“ with extended continental ice sheets at high northern latitudes is still controversely debated – although quite sophisticated geochemical methods are at hand to reconstruct Earth´s history. There are notions that the closure of the Panamanian Gateway was pre-conditioning high northern latitude glaciation. Now, a group of marine scientists from Germany and India under the leadership of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), Kiel, found compelling evidence that between 3.5-2.5 million years the watermass throughflow of the Indonesian Gateway changed at the subsurface level from warm and saline South Pacific watermasses towards cool and fresh ones originating from the North Pacific – with dramatic climatic effects. Keep Reading