SWEET

Just a very quick blog post to advertise another blog I recently wrote, as part of the SWEET project. You can see my post at https://www.deepmip.org/sweet-team-blog-3-november-2018/

For those not in the know, SWEET stands for "Super Warm Early Eocene Temperatures" and is the current project I am working on at the University of Bristol. The early Eocene, roughly 55-50 million years ago, was a time when the world was very different from today, with higher global mean temperatures (of around 5°C) than today and, in particular, much higher temperatures at the poles (potentially up to 20°C higher than today).   This weaker pole-equator temperature gradient resulted in a world without ice, and where all but the driest deserts were covered in rich vegetation (including Antarctica).

The reason I am interested in this period is because, unlike other periods in the past that were also warmer than today (e.g. the mid-Holocene, ~6kya), the early Eocene temperatures can be directly attributed to much higher levels of atmospheric CO2. In fact, levels that could have been up to 4 times higher than today. Given that all future projections of climate change predict higher global mean temperatures due to increasing CO2, and the last time CO2 reached our predicted levels was during the early Eocene, it makes this period a highly appropriate analogue for future climate change.

My current task, as you can read in the above blog post, is to model it!