Earth CAN regulate its temperature over thousands of years to keep the planet within a habitable zone

Earth can regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to keep them within an even range, a new study confirms.

The planet contains a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that can prevent the climate pendulum from swinging too far in either direction over long time scales.

This is thought to be achieved through “silicate weathering” – a geological process during which the slow, steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that draw carbon from the atmosphere into ocean sediments, thereby trapping the gas in rocks.

The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, are based on a study of paleoclimate data that records fluctuations in average global temperatures over the past 66 million years.

Researchers applied a mathematical analysis to determine if the data revealed any patterns that would show a stabilizing phenomenon to keep global temperatures aligned on a very long time scale.

They found that there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the planet’s temperature swings moderate over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That duration is similar to the time scales over which silicate weathering is thought to act.

“You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some kind of stabilizing mechanism to maintain temperatures suitable for life,” said Constantin Arnscheidt, PhD student at MIT :’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“However, it has never been shown from the data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”

Through previous research, scientists have observed the movement of carbon in and out of the Earth’s surface environment to stay relatively balanced – despite global temperature swings.

Scientists believe we are currently in a period of warming and have urged policymakers to implement a series of changes to reduce carbon emissions or become carbon neutral.

Arnscheidt and his colleagues analyzed the history of average global temperatures over 66 million years to consider a range of time scales, including tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, to see if any stabilizing patterns emerged within each time scale.

“To some extent, it’s like your car speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,” Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT, said in a statement.

“There is a time scale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in as the system returns to a steady state.”

Although scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering may help maintain our planet’s carbon cycle, this is the first time they have observed direct evidence of the mechanism.

“On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be interrupted by this stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt explained.

“But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our current problems.”

A remarkable finding of their work is that on much longer timescales, i.e. over a million years, the data showed no stabilizing feedbacks – leading to the question: What was keeping global temperatures in check?

“There is an idea that chance may have played an important role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman said.

“There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt said.

“We can show directly from the data that the answer probably lies somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but sheer luck probably also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.’