Climate Variability and Change, their Impacts on Marine Life and Ecosystems

Abstract

Throughout its 4,500 MY history, the Earth has gone through many changes. Some of these have implied such radical transformations as the coalescence of a crust and the relative movement and redistribution of tectonic plates (the Wilson cycle described in Chapter 1), the advent of life, the transition from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere during the Great Oxidation Event, and finally, with the creation of an atmosphere, the establishment of the climatic system as we know it today. In other words, planet Earth is used to changes and transformations. But with the advent of modern civilization, anthropic (i.e., from the Greek ánthrōpos = human) activities, largely related to agricultural and industrial development and based on fossil fuels as an energy source, have significantly altered biogeochemical cycles, leading to an accelerated change in many of Earth¨s processes.