By THE ALASKA STORY
Feb. 13, 2026 – A new study in Communications Earth & Environment is reshaping how scientists and the public may come to understand Earth’s biggest climate shifts. The study points to plate tectonics, not just volcanoes, as a major driver of greenhouse and “icehouse eras” over the last 540 million years.
Researchers found that Earth’s long-term climate extremes have been controlled by a deep planetary balancing act: how much carbon is released through tectonic activity versus how much is locked away in the ocean floor.
For decades, volcanic arcs, chains of volcanoes formed where tectonic plates collide, were thought to be the dominant source of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere over geologic time.
But the new research challenges that assumption.
Instead, the study concludes that mid-ocean ridges and continental rifts. Those are deep ocean places where plates pull apart, and they may have released even more carbon than volcanic arcs for much of Earth’s history, especially before about 100 million years ago.
Earth’s oceans act as a massive carbon sink, pulling CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in carbonate-rich sediments on the seafloor. Over millions of years, those sediments are carried by moving plates toward subduction zones, where they can be recycled into the mantle or released back through volcanic activity.
That slow recycling system — known as the deep carbon cycle — appears to determine whether Earth enters a warm “greenhouse” phase or a colder “icehouse” climate.
During greenhouse periods, tectonic emissions exceeded carbon burial, raising atmospheric CO₂.
During icehouse periods, carbon sequestration into oceanic plates outpaced emissions, drawing down CO₂ and triggering global cooling.
The researchers also found that volcanic arcs only became major carbon contributors relatively recently, in the last 120 million years, largely due to the rise of planktic calcifiers — microscopic marine organisms that helped generate vast amounts of carbonate sediment on the seafloor.
More sediment meant more carbon being recycled through subduction zones, boosting arc emissions in the modern era.
While today’s climate change is being driven rapidly by human activity, the study offers a deep-time reminder: Earth’s climate has always been linked to forces far below the surface, where shifting plates regulate carbon over millions of years.
The planet’s natural carbon engine, the authors suggest, has played a central role in shaping the world’s long climate history — long before humans ever entered the picture.
3 thoughts on “Earth’s moving plates, not just volcanoes, may have driven climate swings for 540 million years”
Nature is God’s creation.
Insightful article on climate, but how about framing this in terms of 5,000 or 6,000 years. I wonder how long society will indulge the decaying secular trobe of “million years,” in defining God’s creative actions. Why can’t we believe that He created all of our physical realty in an instant, and continues to maintain His creation for His purposes in the universe and in intimate relation with man.
God’s people continue to see His active supernatural participation in all of creation, vis-á-vi nature.
” Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb: ‘I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself, who frustrates the signs of liars and makes fools of diviners, who turns wise men back and makes their knowledge foolish,” – Isaiah 44:24-25
You mean it wasn’t our cars, or a,bunch of flatulent cattle the whole time?? No way!!
“While today’s climate change is being driven rapidly by human activity” Is the science settled on this, and if the science is settled on this, is it actually science? I’ve seen a lot of science that points to naturally occurring phenomenon. A lot of the anthropogenic global warming, now known as climate change is based upon cherry picked or completely adulterated data.