Abrupt warming may be responsible for the mass extinction of mammoths, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide and the University of New South Wales found that short, rapid warming events, known as interstadials, played a key role in mass extinction events of large animals, the megafauna, in Earth's past. These temperature changes closely resemble the man-made warming occurring today.
"This abrupt warming had a profound impact on climate that caused marked shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns," Alan Cooper, lead author of the study and professor at University of Adelaide, said in a statement. "Even without the presence of humans we saw mass extinctions. When you add the modern addition of human pressures and fragmenting of the environment to the rapid changes brought by global warming, it raises serious concerns about the future of our environment."
This conclusion was reached after researchers detected a pattern, 10 years ago, in ancient DNA studies suggesting the rapid disappearance of large species.
At first the researchers thought these were related to intense cold snaps. However, further investigation showed that rapid warming, not sudden cold snaps, was the cause of the extinctions during the last glacial maximum.
According to The Washington Post, this finding could also reverse the belief that "human activity was the primary driver of megafaunal extinction."
"You could connect the arrival of humans to extinctions when humans arrived 50,000 years ago in Australia, for instance, the megafauna disappeared soon after," Cooper told The Washington Post
According to CBS News, researchers found that warming events continued over thousands of years during the last ice age, with "temperatures spiking up 7.2 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit."
The research helps explain further the sudden disappearance of mammoths and giant sloths that became extinct around 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.
"The abrupt warming of the climate caused massive changes to the environment that set the extinction events in motion, but the rise of humans applied the coup de grace to a population that was already under stress," Cooper said.
In addition to the finding, the new statistical methods used to interrogate the datasets (led by Adelaide co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw) and the new data itself has created an extraordinarily precise record of climate change and species movement over the Pleistocene.
The findings are detailed in the journal Science.
