New thoughts about the Cretaceous climate and oceans

Several new discoveries suggest that the climate of the Cretaceous may have been more different from that of today than has been previously supposed. Detailed maps of climate-sensitive fossils and sediments compiled by Nicolai Chumakov and his colleagues in Russia indicate widespread aridity in the equatorial region during the Early Cretaceous. The very warm ocean temperatures postulated for the Mid-Cretaceous by some authors would likely have resulted in unacceptable heat stress for land plants at those latitudes, however, and may be flawed. Seasonal reversals of the atmospheric pressure systems in the Polar Regions are an oversimplification. However, the seasonal pressure differences between 30 degrees and 60 degrees latitude became quite pronounced, being more than 25 hPa in winter and less than 10 hPa in summer. This resulted in inconstant winds, affecting the development of the gyre-limiting frontal systems that control modern ocean circulation. The idea of Hasegawa et al. (2012) who suggest a drastic reduction in the size of the Hadley cells during the warm Cretaceous greenhouse is supported by several numerical climate simulations. Rapid contraction of the Hadley cell such that its sinking dry air occurs at 15 degrees N latitude rather than 30 degrees N is proposed to occur at a threshold of 1000 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere. This change will probably be reached in the next century. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.