Miller-McCune: In the Bighorn Basin rigs have been drilling. Not all for fossil fuel either.
At Miller-McCune Magazine is a story by Bruce Dorminey of the sort one ought to salute. And I do, with caveats we’ll get to.
It describes basic research into ancient climate processes pertinent to the big climate questions humankind faces. It relates some detail on the process of science and its testing of hypotheses and search for new ones, in this case via large-scale geological sampling. It has grandeur to it.
The news is that drill rigs have pulled cores from the Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone in Wyoming, bounded by the Rockies and the Wind River Range on the west, the Bighorn Mountains to the east. If you’ve driven the road from Cody to Mount Rushmore, you’ve been through it. The cores penetrate sediments laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a name so evocative one need not know what it means to be intrigued. It is an example of hyperthermal, a time when Earth’s temperature rose due in large part to increased greenhouse gases – CO2 released over a few to many thousands of years by flood basalt events or other immense increases in volcanic eruptions, or disintegration of methane clathrates in sea beds, and so on. The usefulness of understanding past examples of warming is manifest. Analysis of the cores is now underway.
Included are hyperlinks to background information, including the web site where a University of New Hampshire team describes the project in geological detail. One learns there that CO2 levels may not have risen nearly as fast as they are today, but they peaked at a far higher level – probably more than 1000 ppm compared to the roughly 400 ppm we’re at now, on the way to perhaps twice that in this century.
The magazine provides a list of previous stories Dorminey has written for it. They have variety and indicate a knack for finding news on big, weighty topics. The story is just one example why Miller-McCune, a 3-year-old, non-profit with its offices in Santa Barbara, CA, is a place for serious science writing.
But … one does have a few questions. For instance, we read that this mid-continental drilling program is very different from most searches for geologic sequences through the warming of 56 million years ago, ones in which cores are from sediments under the ocean floor. Okay. But what kind of sediments are those from Wyoming? Are they accumulations of mountain river runoff and flood plains, from lakes, aeolian deposits, maybe buildup in inland seas, or all that or more or what? Why are they more revealing then ocean cores taken from under places that are still ocean? One assumes they include evidence of vegetation changes, deserts or verdant forests, wildlife population rhythms, things like that. But the reader should not be expected to fill that in.
Second, and here’s a little one, we read that the outpourings of CO2 in that ancient time were greater than what we are doing (albeit over a much longer period eons ago than our current burning of fossil fuels is taking). And we read that the source of that CO2 was probably a surge in volcanism. Here’s a quote in the story from one professor: “One idea is that you had a lot of rifting and volcanic activity associated with the North Atlantic’s mid-ocean ridge … Volcanic activity in the midst of large petroleum deposits would be a way of burning a lot of fossil fuel quickly,” thereby releasing loads of carbon. Volcanism may not, today, emit CO2 on a scale anywhere near what the burning of coal and petroleum achieves, but I’d thought that these ancient, persistent volcanic eras carried their own CO2 – and didn’t need to ignite oil or coal deposits to drastically change greenhouse forcings. But if they did, how such coal or oil fields could be right next to a mid-ocean ridge, a place of newly-born oceanic crust and not the ancient sedimentary basins that generate oil and coal, is tough for me to imagine. Maybe it was so. Don’t read this to find out how that happened. Perhaps it was Yellowstone caldera-type eruptions that torched part of our eventual fossil fuel supply but that’s not what the quote suggests.
The story merits attention. I now know to look forward to the analysis of the cores. But the account would have been more satisfying if several holes had been filled.
- Charlie Petit
