A study of sediments in the Junggar Basin in China has revealed an increase in carbon oxide isotopes, which may indicate that the Earth received significantly more sunlight at that time than today. The cause of this phenomenon could be chaos in the Solar System.
Junggar Basin
Scientists from Nanjing University in China recently published a study suggesting that changes in planetary orbits in the past could have led to warming and cooling periods on Earth. They came to this conclusion after studying fossils in the Junggar Basin.
Nowadays, the Junggar Basin is a desert area in the center of the Eurasian continent. But 183 million years ago, at the end of the Jurassic period, it was a lake and marshland region located near the polar region, which was significantly warmer than today.
In those days, these lands were full of life, and many traces of it can still be found in the rocks. And already from them, it is possible to learn, for example, the ancient composition of the atmosphere. Chinese researchers conducted such a study and discovered an unexpected pattern in the change in carbon oxide content, which indicated that our planet could have been receiving significantly more energy from the sun.
Changes in orbital eccentricity
The Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle. It has a certain eccentricity, but it is so small that we hardly notice its influence. But this is true for the present moment. Overall, the shape of the trajectory along which our planet moves is changing. This is due to the influence of Mars, which moves in a fairly elongated orbit with a period of 2.4 million years.
But even these changes are too small to explain the so-called Jenkyns event — the warming that occurred at the end of the Jurassic period, the best paleontological record of which can be found in the Junggar Basin.
The unusual thing that Chinese scientists noticed is that the isotope content in the fossils indicates that the cycle of change in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit has changed. 210 million years ago, it was 1.8 million years, 190 million years ago it was already 2.5 million years, and then, around 180 million years ago, it decreased again to 1.6 million years.
It is generally believed that after the chaos of the dawn of the Solar System, the orbits of the planets remained stable and should not be taken into account in climate models. However, new research shows that at the time of the Jenkyns event, chaos reigned in the Solar System, and this may have been what led to it. Therefore, we cannot be sure that something similar is not happening now.
According to phys.org
