As the world warms, clouds could disappear - catastrophically

ON A 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet’s past that could spell disaster for the future.

A bright-red stratum of sedimentary rock coursing through
 the badlands in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin yielded some of
the first fossil evidence of an extreme global warming event
 56 million years ago.

Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons’ oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today.

Read the story from Wired by Natalia Wolchover - “As the world warms, clouds could disappear - catastrophically.”