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Some 56 million years ago, a massive pulse of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere sent global temperatures soaring. In the oceans, carbonate sediments dissolved, some organisms went extinct and others evolved. A new study estimates ocean acidity increased by about 100 percent in a few thousand years or more, and stayed that way for the next 70,000 years. The study is the first to use the chemical composition of fossils to reconstruct surface ocean acidity at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period of intense warming on land and throughout the oceans due to high CO2. [Source: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University)]
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