The study, also carried out by the Department of Water and Climate of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Institute of Environmental Geosciences of the University Grenoble-Alpes, is based on high-resolution measurements of cores from Antarctic ice.
The rotation of the Earth plays an important role in the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), it emerged Thursday from a new study by an international team of scientists, led by Etienne Legrain, paleoclimatologist at the Glaciology Laboratory of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), published in Nature Geoscience.
Scientists have studied increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, known as CO2 jumps. Over the last 500,000 years, 22 “jumps” have been identified. Analyzes show that 18 of them occurred when the earth’s axis was tilted more than average. This tilt varies naturally over periods of about 41,000 years, which affects how sunlight reaches Earth and influences the amount of CO2 released by sources such as oceans and continental vegetation. “The study shows that when major ocean currents, like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), slow down, it can lead to increased release of CO2 from oceans and land, especially when the Earth’s tilt is high , thus causing these jumps”explains Etienne Legrain.
Although these natural jumps are large, they are smaller than the amount of CO2 that human activities are adding to the atmosphere currently. The “jumps” increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 10 parts per million (ppm) per century, while human activities increased it by more than 100 ppm in half a century.
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