Date:
Location:
Speaker: Jake Seeley
Jake will lead the discussion on the paper titled ‘Arc-continent collisions in the tropics set Earth’s climate state’ by Macdonald et al. (Attached)
Jake’s blurb is below, adapted from the abstract:
On multimillion-year time scales, Earth has alternated between warm, ice-free climates and cold, glacial climates. What causes these transitions in climate state? Macdonald et al. argue that Earth’s climate state is set primarily by the latitudinal distribution of a particular type of tectonic collision. In particular, they hypothesize that low-latitude arc-continent collisions drive global cooling by exhuming highly weatherable rocks in the warm, wet tropics, thereby increasing Earth’s potential to sequester carbon (i.e., strengthening the silicate-weathering carbon dioxide sink). The authors make their case by reconstructing the paleogeographic position of all major Phanerozoic arc-continent collisions, and comparing to the latitudinal distribution of ice sheets. This analysis reveals a strong correlation between the extent of glaciation and arc-continent collisions in the tropics.