A sudden underground event has been linked to the expansion of an ancient desert across modern China. While the changes occurred 120 million years ago, researchers believe understanding the event is a key step in forecasting and preparing for unimaginable weather events that humankind has yet to face.
Monash University geologist Dr Peter Cawood collaborated with an international team on the study, that examined how the thickening of the Earth’s crust sparked the rapid formation of peaks that soared to 2,500 metres above sea level. This new mountain range likely created a 15 per cent increase in aridity and the expansion of the desert eastwards — both of which likely changed the evolutionary path of plants and animals.
“The development of the mountain range had a major impact on the climate — we can see that from our modelling and in the rocks themselves. That must have driven major changes,” he told Yahoo News.
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Before the mountain range was created, warm ocean air would wet the surrounding landscape. Source: Peter Cawood
What was the weather like before the mountains formed?
It’s believed the landscape along China’s east coast was lush and fertile. The environment was nurtured by moist, warm ocean air that uniformly spread rain across the plains.
But after the mountain range formed, the warm air was driven upwards by its peaks, causing it to cool and dump rain along the coast, leaving the interior dry and arid.
“A limited example of that is the Great Dividing Range in Australia. Its peaks are pretty low, but we know that close to the East Coast, we often get high rainfall in places like Dorrigo and Coffs Harbour, but once you move inland and you cross the divide, then it becomes much dryer,” Cawood explained.
During the Millennium drought, land on the western side of the Great Dividing Range dried out more than on the coastal side. Source: Michael Dahlstrom
How will the world change in future?
The Monash University research, published in the journal Science Advances overnight, used newly developed modelling tools to focus on a moment in time, as geologists build a wider understanding of climactic changes on Earth over billions of years — what’s referred to as deep time.
“We can see all these diverse environments on Earth today. And what we’re increasingly trying to do is understand them in deep time and understand what the drivers are,” Cawood said.
Human societies lack the lived experience to comprehend the dramatic upheaval our weather systems are currently undergoing due to man-made climate change. But understanding the types of environments that existed in the past and how they have evolved, will help us to imagine how dramatically the relatively stable world we live in today could alter over time. And this knowledge will allow us to plan our cities, roads and agriculture for dramatically different weather systems.
“We’re trying to understand the kinds of environments that existed in the past and how they have changed — how things like distributions of continents affect ocean circulation, affect erosion, affect atmospheric compositions. We’re looking at the past, and it allows us to understand the future,” Cawood said.
Changes to the surface of our planet will likely alter weather systems in our own lifetimes. For instance, coral reefs form a barrier between extreme weather events like cyclones and waves associated with king tides. But as ocean temperatures continue to warm, and reefs die off, the layer of protection they provide between water and land will be lost, and coastal communities will experience harsher storms.
Cawood describes the Earth as a “magnificent, complex, beautiful” place and this period of stability as a “flash in the pan” moment.
“We are living in this almost Goldilocks time in terms of human occupation, and its ability to inhabit large segments of the Earth,” he said.
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