Study of ancient climate can help predict future patterns

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have initiated discussion among climate forecasters concerning the link between global warming and a surge in the intensity of storms. Based on information from his study of ancient global climate changes, one University of Missouri-Columbia researcher said that it may be reasonable to expect stronger storms in the future.

Ken MacLeod, associate professor of Geological Sciences, and his team studied rocks in the North Atlantic and discovered while the earth was cooling elsewhere 70 million years ago, the North Atlantic was getting warmer. MacLeod said the scale of this ancient climate change is comparable to predictions for the next 50 years, but the coming decades should see average warming instead of cooling. In addition to calls for higher temperatures, predictions include a rising sea level and a greater size and frequency of storms.

"The changes to the atmosphere caused by humans over the past 150 years are as large as the changes that occurred naturally over the past 35 million years," MacLeod said. "You have to look back that far to find carbon dioxide levels at what we expect them to be in the next 50 years. It is reasonable to expect there will be more intense storms and an extended hurricane season."

These findings mean that in order to obtain the average global warming that is predicted, regional variances will make some places cooler and others warmer than expected. Those especially warm areas will suffer extreme changes that could be disastrous. MacLeod said until the global cooling that began about 70 million years ago, the earth had been extremely warm for 25 million years.

MacLeod received his undergraduate degree in biology and geology from Williams College. He received master’s degree and doctorate at The University of Washington. He had post-doctoral appointments at the Smithsonian Institution and taught at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before joining the MU faculty in 1999. His research is focused on better understanding relationships between the distribution of fossil organisms and variations in paleoclimate/paleooceanography across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales.

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Ken MacLeod
Department of Geological Sciences

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