56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly

By Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne
Julian Rogger, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

Around 56 million years ago, Earth suddenly got much hotter. Over about 5,000 years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere drastically increased and global temperatures shot up by some 6°C.

As we show in new research published in Nature Communications, one consequence was that many of the world’s plants could no longer thrive. As a result, they soaked up less carbon from the atmosphere, which may have contributed to another interesting thing…

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