Look at fossils on your phone to help researchers uncover Earth’s past

Fossilised plants tell stories of Earth’s capricious past. By participating in the Fossil Atmospheres project, you can help researchers uncover them, find Layal Liverpool

13 October 2021

By Layal Liverpool

 

 

IF YOU could time travel, which period from history would you choose to visit? I recently took a trip back to the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum – a time period about 56 million years ago during which a huge amount of carbon dioxide was released into Earth’s atmosphere, causing the global temperature to rise by about 5°C.

Many scientists are interested in how this drastic change affected life on Earth, not least because knowing more about it could help us better predict the impacts of current and future climate change. You can assist them by taking the same trip I …