As Earth and Mars orbit the sunlight in the sun, they pull each other in gravity, causing their paths to stretch and relax in a cycle that repeats every 2.4 million years. These subtle orbital shifts change the planet’s distance to the sun, thus changing its long-term climate pattern.
New research shows that the Mars-Earth cycle once had a cycle of 1.6 million years, consistent with major climate fluctuations. This work was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNA).
The study was led by Yanan Fang of the Institute of Geology and Paleontology in Nanjing and Paul Olsen of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and part of the Columbia Climate School.
The researchers found that geological evidence of a shorter 1.6 million rhythmic rhythm was preserved in the Jurassic Lake sediments formed by Sangiger in northwestern China. The signals they measured were lined up to three full 1.6 million annual “beats” about 183 million years ago. One’s defeat was consistent with Jenkens’ activity when the huge lava erupted in South Africa briefly but warmed the planet by releasing a large number of volcanic companies.2.
“This means that the concurrent occurrence of these two separate events may expand their climate impacts, although this remains to be fully explored,” Olson said.
Another key result of their study involves the distances where guard scientists can rebuild planets’ orbits. So far, orbital calculations are only reliable to about 60 million years ago; in addition to this, the chaotic interaction between planetary bodies makes reconstruction unreliable.
Fang and Olsen’s new geological records, combined with older data sets, pushed the border of about 120 million years into the past and confirmed that the length of the Mars-Earth cycle may change significantly during the geological period due to the chaos in the solar system.
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