Caltech Makes New Link to Ancient Climate Change

A new paper by a Caltech team headed by John Eiler has made some rather remarkable discoveries about our world 450 million years ago. By using a new Isotope cantered technique, Eiler has shown the Ordovician mass extinction to have been caused by climate change.The new science involved shows promise along a range of time periods.  The truth about climate science is that it is science, and that means the answer you get is what you get. That is what science is.

PASADENA, Calif.—About 450 million years ago, Earth suffered the second-largest mass extinction in its history—the Late Ordovician mass extinction, during which more than 75 percent of marine species died. Exactly what caused this tremendous loss in biodiversity remains a mystery, but now a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered new details supporting the idea that the mass extinction was linked to a cooling climate.

"While it’s been known for a long time that the mass extinction is intimately tied to climate change, the precise mechanism is unclear," says Seth Finnegan, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and the first author of the paper published online in Science on January 27. The mass extinction coincided with a glacial period, during which global temperatures cooled and the planet saw a marked increase in glaciers. At this time, North America was on the equator, while most of the other continents formed a supercontinent known as Gondwana that stretched from the equator to the South Pole.

To follow the rest of the story, please follow this link;  http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13400

For a taped interview, expressing this news in the author's own voice and words;
Paper's Author Eiler speaks