Plants will take millions of years to recover from global warming, study finds

The disruption of vegetation due to warming can lead to the collapse of climate-regulating mechanisms for millions of years. When vegetation changes, it alters the planet’s climate equilibrium, with potentially severe consequences that can last for millennia.

Earth’s geological history offers valuable insight into today’s global warming. Periods of catastrophic volcanic eruptions, for example, released vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans. This surge in carbon triggered rapid climate warming, leading to mass extinctions on land and in marine ecosystems.

Such events may have disrupted carbon-climate regulation systems for millions of years, providing a glimpse into the potential long-term effects of current global warming.

A team of Earth and environmental scientists from ETH Zurich, along with researchers from the University of Arizona, University of Leeds, CNRS Toulouse, and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), conducted a study to understand how vegetation responds to major climatic shifts and how these shifts impact Earth’s natural carbon-climate regulation system. The research focused on how vegetation evolves in response to drastic changes and the implications for climate regulation.

The team used geochemical analyses of isotopes in sediments and compared this data with a specially designed model that represented vegetation’s role in regulating the geological climate system. By testing how the Earth system responds to intense carbon release from volcanic activity, they studied three significant climatic shifts in geological history, including the Siberian Traps event, which caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction about 252 million years ago.

According to ETH Zurich professor Taras Gerya, “The Siberian Traps event released some 40,000 gigatons (Gt) of carbon over 200,000 years. The resulting increase in global average temperatures between 5 - 10°C caused Earth’s most severe extinction event in the geologic record.”

The recovery of vegetation from such catastrophic events took millions of years. During this time, Earth’s carbon-climate regulation system was weak and inefficient, leading to prolonged climate warming. The study found that the severity of these events depended on how quickly emitted carbon could be returned to Earth’s interior—either through silicate mineral weathering or organic carbon production, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.

The time it took for the climate to reach a new state of equilibrium also depended on how fast vegetation adapted to rising temperatures. Some species evolved, while others migrated to cooler regions. However, in some cases, the changes were so extreme that plants didn’t have enough time to adapt or migrate, leaving a lasting geochemical mark on climate evolution for thousands, possibly millions, of years.

What does this mean for today’s human-induced climate change? The study highlights that the disruption of vegetation increases the duration and severity of climate warming, as seen in the geologic past. In some cases, it may take millions of years to achieve a new stable climatic equilibrium due to a reduced capacity of vegetation to regulate Earth’s carbon cycle.

Loïc Pellissier, Professor of Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution at ETH Zurich and WSL, remarks, “Today, we find ourselves in a major global bioclimatic crisis. Our study demonstrates the importance of functioning vegetation in recovering from abrupt climatic changes.

We are currently releasing greenhouse gases at a faster rate than any previous volcanic event and are also the primary cause of global deforestation, which strongly reduces the ability of natural ecosystems to regulate the climate. This study, in my perspective, serves as a ‘wake-up call’ for the global community.”

Note: Materials provided above by The Brighter Side of News. Content may be edited for style and length.

Like these kind of feel good stories? Get The Brighter Side of News' newsletter.