Francis Macdonald and Lorraine Lisiecki featured in the journal Science.

Francis Macdonald and Lorraine Lisiecki featured in the journal Science. Congratulations Francis and Lorraine!

View the complete paper at: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/03/13/science.aav5300.full

New insights emerge from UC Santa Barbara on what drives long-term climatic trends

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — For the entire history of our species, humans have lived on a planet capped by a chunk of ice at each pole. But Earth has been ice-free for about 75 percent of the time since complex life first appeared. This variation in background climate, between partly glaciated and ice-free, has puzzled geologists for decades.??

Now a team of scientists led by UC Santa Barbara’s Francis Macdonald has published a study suggesting that tectonic activity may be the culprit. They found that long-term trends in Earth’s climate are set by the presence or absence of collisions between volcanic arcs and continents in the tropics. The results appear in the journal Science.