THE NEW CLIMATE

Earth Took 269,000 Years to Recover From This Climate Event

A new study shows Earth’s last big carbon crisis lasted longer than we thought, and what that means for us now

Image created by the Author with CANVA

It started with a rock. A paleontologist colleague told me about crouching in the badlands of the in Wyoming, fingers coated in dust, holding a chunk of ancient mudstone between their hands. They brought it to the lab.

I was excited. These rocks aren’t just rocks; they’re time capsules. That layer in particular was part of a stretch geologists have been poking at for decades.

It captured a moment, 56 million years ago, when the Earth suddenly got much hotter, much faster. It’s called the , or PETM, and it’s one of the closest natural analogs we have to the global warming we’re driving today.

Even then, we knew the PETM was a big deal. But how long it lasted—and what ended it—has always been a bit fuzzy. Now, thanks to new work by Dr. Victor Piedrahita and his team, this ancient event may have dragged on for way longer than we thought.

And that’s kind of a big deal.