Statistical analysis of Earth’s climate indicates that the stabilization mechanism dampens strong climate fluctuations. This could have contributed to the fact that the Earth never got too hot or too cold for life for billions of years. According to a report by Konstantin W. Arnscheidt and Daniel H. Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, temperature fluctuations over periods of up to 400,000 years are no greater than temperature fluctuations over timescales of about 4,000 years. However, one would expect for statistical fluctuations that the longer the time period, the farther apart the maximum and minimum temperatures would be. The result indicates that a mechanism that stabilizes the Earth’s climate over such short periods of time, The team writes in the journal Science Advances..
One of the greatest mysteries about Earth’s climate is why it is so stable. twists Between the ground snowball and the Greenhouse world of the age of dinosaurs It may sound extreme, but our neighboring planets, Venus and Mars, are already showing how hostile life is to an Earth-like planet. So many experts suspect that geological feedback loops kept Earth’s climate habitable. One of them is silicate weathering. Mineral silicates are found in almost all rocks and dissolve slowly under the action of carbonic acid, which is produced by dissolving carbon dioxide in water. In doing so, it permanently removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This process works faster the warmer it gets and the more carbon dioxide there is in the air. As a result, high concentrations of carbon dioxide mean that the gas binds faster and faster, while at lower concentrations it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and accumulates. According to Arnscheidt and Rothman, this process is the most likely candidate for stabilization they found because it should theoretically take place on the time scales of a few thousand to a few hundred thousand years that are in the analysis. However, the two researchers point out that their discovery partially explains why Earth has always been so friendly to life. After about 400,000 years, the fluctuations increase again over time, as would be expected theoretically — over very long periods of time, there does not appear to be any mitigating effect on Earth’s climate. So it may be a coincidence that none of these climate freaks were large enough to wipe out life on Earth.
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