ISO-Paläo

Abstract

Deciphering climate changes in the geological past and understanding the processes that led to them. Subsequently, a better understanding of global changes in the past should improve the possibilities for predicting climate development and support modeling. The investigation of the geological past is an important possibility to understand and reconstruct globally running processes (in this case already run processes) and to be able to determine the various influencing factors. While modeling into the future always represents the prediction with the inclusion of numerous preconditions and assumptions, processes that have taken place in the past are identified and explained in the reconstruction. The advantage in this lies in the fact that these processes actually took place, the disadvantage in the often only partially available documentation and archiving of the procedures, processes and framework conditions. The largest global extinction event in the history of the earth lies in the time interval between Upper Permian and Middle Triassic. There is much evidence that this was a rapid global climate change caused by a sharp and sudden increase in temperature, which destabilized and changed the entire ecosystem, an upheaval that many species could not adapt to and led to their extinction. There are clear indications that this rise in temperature was at least partly caused by an increase in greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, a possibility that can be seen as an analogy to the present. The study of the processes that took place in the past can thus serve as information gathering for phenomena that may occur in our near or near future, which are set in motion by the recent global warming.