With global warming apparently here to stay, a team of paleoclimatologists are studying an ancient source to determine future rainfall and drought patterns: fossilized plants that lived on Earth millions of years ago.
In September 2023, extreme rains struck South Africa's Western Cape province, flooding villages and leaving a trail of destruction. The catastrophic devastation is just one recent example in a string of extreme weather events that are growing more common around the world. Fueled by rising sea surface temperatures from global warming, torrential storms are increasing both in frequency and magnitude.
The team's work was inspired by collaborator and study co-author Natalie Burls, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences at George Mason University. Burls, an oceanographer and climate scientist from South Africa who received a Ph.D. at the University of Cape Town, has long been intrigued by the way geological evidence from past warm climates in Earth's history can help researchers make sense of future rainfall and drought conditions.
Researchers dilute sediment cores with a variety of solvents. The samples are forced through a column of silica gel, which traps the unwanted chemicals and leaves the alkanes they want to measure. The dark line at the bottom of the liquid in the middle three columns is where some extra chemicals are getting stuck, while other chemicals can traverse through the gel to drip into vials at the bottom.
The study's third author, Ran Feng, assistant professor of Earth sciences at the University of Connecticut, helped analyze the comparison data and specifically examined the proposed mechanism that explains the Pliocene wet conditions in southwest Africa. She says many features of ongoing climate change are reincarnations of the past warm climates.
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