Mud cores drilled in Mississippi hold long-hidden clues about the origins of gigantic Antarctic ice sheets around 34 million years ago, new research shows.
As those ice sheets grew during the Eocene-Oligocene transition, sea levels also fell by roughly 40 meters , exposing swaths of previously submerged land in the wake of receding coastlines.into the atmosphere, according to the research team's analysis of ancient mud from the same time period collected near Jackson, Mississippi.
"We've unearthed information from the Mississippi mud to answer a key question about how Antarctic ice massively expanded to continental scale,"senior author Tom Dunkley Jones, a micropaleontologist and paleoceanographer at the University of Birmingham in the UK. These Antarctic ice sheets, the study's authors note, originally formed due to the long-term burial of carbon in sediments, sequestering it away from the atmosphere, where it famouslyThat drop in atmospheric carbon also enabled Earth's broader transition to the cooler modern climate of the past 34 million years, they add, creating chillier conditions that helped massive ice sheets form in Antarctica, which in turn led to the global decrease in sea levels.
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