Study: Glaciers Survived Global Hothouse
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Glaciers persisted when the Earth was far hotter than today, scientists have found.
Earth was thought to be ice-free during the so-called Turonian period, a “supergreenhouse world” between 93.5 million and 89.3 million years ago. But studies of tiny plankton and other marine organisms in tropical waters show that large ice-sheets existed about 91 million years ago, during one of the warmest periods in the past 500 million years, the international team reports in the journal Science.
The scientists from Britain, Germany, America, and the Netherlands found evidence of an approximately 200,000-year period of widespread glaciation, with ice sheets about 60% the size of the modern Antarctic ice cap.
