Permafrost in the Cretaceous supergreenhouse

Juan Pedro Rodríguez-López, Chihua Wu (), Tatiana A. Vishnivetskaya, Julian B. Murton, Wenqiang Tang and Chao Ma
Additional contact information
Juan Pedro Rodríguez-López: Chengdu University of Technology
Chihua Wu: Chengdu University of Technology
Tatiana A. Vishnivetskaya: University of Tennessee
Julian B. Murton: University of Sussex
Wenqiang Tang: Chengdu University of Technology
Chao Ma: Chengdu University of Technology

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Earth’s climate during the last 4.6 billion years has changed repeatedly between cold (icehouse) and warm (greenhouse) conditions. The hottest conditions (supergreenhouse) are widely assumed to have lacked an active cryosphere. Here we show that during the archetypal supergreenhouse Cretaceous Earth, an active cryosphere with permafrost existed in Chinese plateau deserts (astrochonological age ca. 132.49–132.17 Ma), and that a modern analogue for these plateau cryospheric conditions is the aeolian–permafrost system we report from the Qiongkuai Lebashi Lake area, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. Significantly, Cretaceous plateau permafrost was coeval with largely marine cryospheric indicators in the Arctic and Australia, indicating a strong coupling of the ocean–atmosphere system. The Cretaceous permafrost contained a rich microbiome at subtropical palaeolatitude and 3–4 km palaeoaltitude, analogous to recent permafrost in the western Himalayas. A mindset of persistent ice-free greenhouse conditions during the Cretaceous has stifled consideration of permafrost thaw as a contributor of C and nutrients to the palaeo-oceans and palaeo-atmosphere.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35676-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-35676-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35676-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().