Research team reveals that ocean’s temperature may have been wrong

A group of researchers announced that they have discovered a flaw in the way ocean’s temperatures were measured up to this date. This discovery can raise some serious that concerns regarding the current levels of climate change.

According to the research team, the temperature of the oceans 100 million years ago were around 15 degrees higher than today’s readings. This approach, however, is being doubted, as some claim that the ocean temperatures might have remained relatively stable during this period.

These are the conclusions of a study that French researchers from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Sorbonne University and the University of Strasbourg, and Swiss researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Lausanne, have revealed.

The study has just been published in Nature Communications.

    Anders Meibom, the head of EPFL’s Laboratory for Biological Geochemistry and a professor at the University of Lausanne, says: “If we are right, our study challenges decades of paleoclimate research. Oceans cover 70% of our planet. They play a key role in Earth’s climate. Knowing the extent to which their temperatures have varied over geological time is crucial if we are to gain a fuller understanding of how they behave and to predict the consequences of current climate change more accurately.”

The study’s authors believe they figured out why the existing methodology could be so wrong.

According to the research team, scientists base their estimations in ‘foraminifera’. This is the the fossils of tiny marine organisms found in the ocean floor. Scientists in order to calculate ocean’s temperature were measuring the ‘oxygen-18 content’ of foraminifera which can be altered by the water’s temperature. Thus concluding that the ocean is now 15 degrees cooler that 100 million years ago.

However, these test were ran in the base that the oxygen-18 content of the foraminifera remained the same throughout these years. To prove this wrong, the authors of this research conducted some tests which indicated that foraminifera can change without leaving a visible trace

    T”What appeared to be perfectly preserved fossils are in fact not. This means that the paleotemperature estimates made up to now are incorrect,” notes Sylvain Bernard, a CNRS researcher at the Paris-based Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry and the study’s lead author.

From now on the research team, will re-run the tests in different types of marine organisms so that they can have a better image of how the ocean’s temperature have been evolved.  “