The Earth’s climate has experienced some big changes. A new study shows that the planet has a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to keep global temperatures within a steady habitable range.
The likely mechanism is “silicate weathering” – a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.
The team found that there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to happen.
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-earth-temperature-millennia.html