The history of the Earth marked by small “jumps” of CO2

Over the millennia, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) has perpetually varied on the surface of the planet. The study of ice cores, true climate archives, allows us to know the past composition of the atmosphere, to study its evolution and its complex links with the climate machine. A new study published in Nature Geoscience and carried out by researchers from the Institute of Environmental Geosciences of Grenoble (IGE) has thus highlighted the existence of « CO jumps₂ »significant variations in the carbon concentration in the atmosphere over the last 500,000 years, occurring very quickly on geological time scales (less than a century).

It was the analysis of samples from the Epica ice core, drilled in the Dome C sector, in Antarctica, not far from the Franco-Italian Concordia base, which made this discovery possible. The Epica carrot is the archive…