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Potential links between continental rifting, CO2 degassing and climate change through time

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 941–946 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a key influence on Earth’s climate. Today, significant quantities of CO2 are emitted at continental rifts, suggesting that the spatial and temporal extent of rift systems may have influenced deep carbon fluxes and thus climate change throughout geological time. Here we test this hypothesis by conducting a worldwide census of continental rift lengths over the last 200 million years. We estimate tectonic CO2 release rates through time and show that along the extensive Mesozoic and Cenozoic rift systems, rift-related CO2 degassing rates reached more than 300% of present-day values. Using a numerical carbon cycle model, we find that two prominent periods of enhanced rifting 160 to 100 million years ago and after 55 million years ago coincided with greenhouse climate episodes, during which atmospheric CO2 concentrations were more than three times higher than today. We therefore propose that continental fragmentation and long-term climate change could plausibly be linked via massive CO2 degassing in rift systems.

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Fig. 1: Timing and location of continental rifting.
Fig. 2: Cumulative rift length through time.
Fig. 3: Rift controls on palaeo–atmospheric CO2 levels.
Fig. 4: Effect of rifts, ridges, subduction zones and continental arcs.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Royer for publicly sharing the R script of GEOCARBSULF and R. Ernst for kindly providing the data on large igneous provinces. This research has been funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Project 57319603. S.B. was supported through the Helmholtz Young Investigators Group CRYSTALS (VH-NG-1132). S.E.W. and R.D.M were supported by Australian Research Council grant IH130200012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany

    Sascha Brune

  2. Institute of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Potsdam, Potsdam-Golm, Germany

    Sascha Brune

  3. EarthByte Group, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Simon E. Williams & R. Dietmar Müller

  4. Sydney Informatics Hub, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    R. Dietmar Müller

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Contributions

S.B. and S.E.W. developed the analytical workflow. S.B. conducted the numerical models. S.B., S.E.W. and R.D.M. discussed and integrated the results. The manuscript was written by S.B. with contributions from all authors.

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Correspondence to Sascha Brune.

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Supplementary Video

Plate boundary evolution since 200 Myr ago. This animation depicts the location of rifts, ridges, and subduction zones through time, based on the Müller et al. (2016) plate reconstruction. The time-dependent global length of these plate boundaries is shown in Fig. 4a

Supplementary Dataset

Geological rift record. The geological rift record, based on the rift database of Sengör & Natal'in (2001). See Methods for more information

Supplementary Figure

Overview map with rift identification. Rift locations according to the rift database of Sengör & Natal'in (2001). Circle size is proportional to rift length and circle colour is taken as the mid-point between rift initiation and the end of rift activity

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Brune, S., Williams, S.E. & Müller, R.D. Potential links between continental rifting, CO2 degassing and climate change through time. Nature Geosci 10, 941–946 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-017-0003-6

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