RIFT-CC: Rifting as a driver of long-term Climate Change

Earth's long-term climate changes because carbon dioxide levels change naturally over extremely long timeframes.

Over millions of years, changes in volcanic activity can result in higher or lower CO2 emissions, and can therefoe cause global warming or cooling. However one type of volcanism has been missing from our understanding here - continental rifting.

This is a process in which continents rip apart to form new oceans, and is known to emit CO2, but is not included in 'Earth system' computer models in a meaningful way.

In this project we will map out rift locations and CO2 emissions to add them to a state-of-the-art global model, which we can then use to test the contribution of rifting to long-term climate change.

We hypothesise that some rifts will act to remove CO2 through rock weathering reactions, while others may have driven warm periods in the past which are currently not well understood.