Earth Can Regulate its Own Temperature Over Millennia, New Study Finds

Runaway1956 writes:

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-earth-temperature-millennia.html

The Earth's climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.

Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a "stabilizing feedback" mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.

Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is "silicate weathering"-a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.

Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth's carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide-and global temperatures-in check. But there's never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.

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