For Immediate Release Media Contact: Greg Borzo (312) 665-7106 gborzo@fieldmuseum.org General Information about The Field Museum: (312) 922-9410 Now, a new theory holds that OAEs – in particular the Toarcian OAE, which occurred about 183 million years ago during the age of dinosaurs – are triggered by the burning of vast underground coalfields. These coalfields were set ablaze by the intrusion of molten rock from the Earth’s crust. “The burnt coalfields are hundreds of feet thick and cover vast areas of the Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, as well as South Africa,” said Jennifer McElwain, PhD, Associate Curator of Paleobotany at Chicago’s Field Museum and lead author of the research. “Huge quantities of methane and carbon dioxide would have been released from these coals as they were heated to high temperatures by the molten rock.” Although OAEs are not universally accepted as models upon which an understanding of modern climate change can be based, this new research sheds light on the possible consequences of the current level of consumption of carbon-based fuels. “If the incredibly high global temperatures that occurred during the Toarcian oceanic anoxic event were caused by burning a significant amount of the Earth’s coal deposits within one hundred thousand years, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize what will happen if we burn most of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels over the coming century, which is what we are in the process of doing,” McElwain said. The scientists, who worked on this research for more than four years, also turned up a totally unexpected result: they identified a 200,000-year interval when atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped to surprisingly low levels at the start of the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event. This was probably due to the great number and activity of marine organisms at this time that effectively sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere like a sponge. This drop cooled the Earth, maybe even enough to have enabled ice sheets to form and grow in the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Continue>>