A new study finds that Earth’s “stabilizing feedback” keeps global temperatures in check.
The scientists pinpointed this mechanism to be “silicate weathering,” which is a geological process that helps regulate our planet’s
It can also be deduced from Earth’s habitability that there are some built-in mechanisms to control temperatures. After all, in the last 800,000 years, the planet has experiencedof ice ages and warm periods, with the end of the last ice age around 11,700 years ago -- the beginning of the modern climate era. How did the planet make such drastic adjustments? By reaching their conclusion, the new study was the first to use actual data to demonstrate the workings of stabilizing feedback.
One theory is that it could have been simply chance. As the paper states, chance "may have played a nonnegligible role in maintaining the long-term habitability of Earth.
Constantin Arnscheidt: We used data of past global temperature evolution to show that there is a stabilizing feedback on global temperature on 100,000-year timescales. This is consistent with the "silicate weathering feedback" that has been proposed by Earth scientists since at least the 1980s. On timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, CO2 is added to the atmosphere by tectonic processes and removed by ocean burial.
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