Prerequisites
This course is hosted by and based in the Department of Earth Sciences. It will assume a knowledge of Part IA NST Earth Sciences. Students who have no prior Earth Science education are welcome to contact the lecturer for reading and background material before the course starts.
Synopsis
This course is about Earth’s climate system and the global carbon cycle and how the global carbon cycle varies over various timescales. In addition to discussing short term perturbations to Earth’s climate system and anthropogenic climate change, this course will explore the various processes that have led to changes in Earth’s climate over the last 300 million years. Over long-time scales, the amount of carbon at Earth’s surface varies as a function of the exchange of carbon between the surface and the subsurface, or mantle. Feedbacks exist that allow the planet to remain habitable, within a narrow temperature range, over geological time. That said, there are greenhouse and ice house episodes and understanding how Earth’s has survived and tranisitioned between these is key for understanding how Earth will respond under increased pCO2 over the coming centuries through anthropogenic global warming. The course will take a holistic view, understanding how climate changes over geological time and what the various processes at Earth’s surface are important in this context. It is beneficial if students have had the IA Earth Sciences Course through the NST, but it is not compulsory, and can be enjoyed by physicists, chemists, and material scientists regardless.
Lectures (14)
The course will address the following questions:
• How have Carbon Dioxide concentrations varied over geological time?
• How does the carbon cycle over short and long time scales differ? What are the fundamental controls on the fluxes of carbon among various reservoirs on Earth?
• What feedbacks exist within Earth’s surface environment to survive perturbations to the climate system?
• When have we had greenhouse and icehouse conditions at Earth’s surface?
• What models exist for understanding the transition from greenhouse to icehouse conditions?
• Short term perturbations to Earth’s climate system, with a lecture each on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, the K/T boundary, Cretaceous Ocean anoxic events, and the Permo-Triassic boundary. How does the planet return to normal after a jolt to the system? When is life affected by this?
• Comparative planetology, why things are different on Mars and Venus?
Recommended book to read before the course:
How to Build a Habitable Planet, by Wally Broecker and Charles Langmuir
Contact: teaching@esc.cam.ac.uk