Present-day location:
Paleolocation:
Age:
Stratigraphic description:
Paleoclimate data:
Future projection data:
The last 100 MILLION years
The next 80 years
8.3 °C
9.5 °C
This tool allows you to explore similarities between past climate states and projected future climates.
Left: Earth's climate during the last 100 million years. It shows temperature and precipitation anomalies relative to the present day, as well as changes in the paleogeography, vegetation and ocean currents from a series of paleoclimate model simulations. These simulations are performed with the HadCM3 climate model and incorporate our best estimate of changes in the paleogeography, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, solar insolation and ice sheets over geological time. These so called boundary conditions are defined for a set of target time slices (roughly one every 5 million years) and the model then simulates the resulting distribution of temperature and precipitation, as well as atmospheric winds and ocean currents for each time period following physical, chemical and biological laws and equations.
Right: Projections of Earth's climate for the next 80 years under different emissions scenarios. The data comes from the latest generation of climate model simulations (CMIP6 - Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6) performed for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. The SSP scenarios (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) represent different possible futures of societal development and associated greenhouse gas emissions. The displayed data shows the ensemble mean of several dozen individual climate models.
By comparing past and future climate states, we can better understand the magnitude and impacts of current climate change in the context of Earth's history. Explore how we are currently compressing millions of years of past climate change into the span of a couple of decades, which is unprecedented in the history of the Earth.