Silicate Weathering: Earth Can Undergo 100,000-Year Geological Process to Reverse Global Warming

Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago and has experienced a multitude of catastrophic extinction-level events since then.

Still, the Blue Planet managed to survive and prevented from transforming into an inhabitable environment, whether it is terrestrial or marine.

The emergence of the planet's simplest life forms 3.7 billion years ago and their persistence until now is a testament to it.

Now, a new study spearheaded by researchers in the United States suggests that our planet managed to survive these apocalyptic events, including global volcanic eruptions and ice ages, due to a geological process called silicate weathering.

Earth uses this process that takes around 100,000 years to complete, which can regulate global temperatures and potentially reverse the ongoing global warming.

Global Warming Reversal

In a news release on Wednesday, November 16, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that its scientists have confirmed that Earth can regulate its own temperature over a millennia.

This is based on the study it led, which suggested that our planet has "stabilizing feedback" on a 100,000-year period that keeps global temperatures in check and prevent it from skyrocketing.

The educational institution's MIT News Office issued the media announcement, which informs the public about the findings of MIT researchers that the said geological process enables Mother Nature to pull the climate back from the brink of destruction by keeping global temperatures stable within habitable range.

The next section highlights how the silicate weathering mechanism is able to achieve this.

Silicate Weathering

The MIT study was published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday explores the existence of silicate weathering, which was previously encountered by other researchers in the past but has not fully measured and confirmed it only until now.

In the study, the MIT research team found that the said stabilizing feedback is sometimes present or absent on different timescales.

This means that Earth's 'global temperature conditioning system' is not always active.

However, it is possible to become active again if certain harmful levels of planet-warming greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, and extremely warm temperature reach unprecedented levels.

This assessment is based on paleoclimate data about changes in average global temperatures in the last 66 million years.

Paleoclimate Data

The team found that silicate weathering involves actual silicate rocks that can undergo chemical reactions that absorb carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere and transfer them into ocean sediments, where the greenhouse gases are trapped in the rocks.

The MIT research highlighted the certainty that the current global warming will eventually be canceled out through the geological process, but it will not be fast enough to solve our present-day issues since it will take thousands of years to manifest, according to Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), as cited by MIT News Office.

The findings revealed about how silicate weather protects living organisms from global warming can serve as a bases for future climate studies.