New research shows that magmatism played a role in global warming in the Geologic past

Brian Schubert, an Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences, together with colleagues from Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark, published a new paper on the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, an extreme global warming event that occurred 55.8 million years ago.

They studied mercury anomalies in sedimentary rocks from five sites that cover the event to assess whether there were periods of elevated volcanism associated with global warming. Their work showed that sites close to the eruptions from the North Atlantic Igneous Province displayed significant mercury anomalies across this time interval, suggesting that magmatism played a role in the observed global warming.

This work was published in Climate of the Past