Earth’s Climate History from 4.5 Billion Years to One Minute

Abstract

ABSTRACT Earth’s climate history is important for understanding the dynamics and feedbacks of the climate system. However, atmospheric sciences generally focus on shorter timescales, while geological sciences focus on longer timescales, but a unified picture is desired. This paper reviews the observations of Earth’s climate history from 4.5 billion years to one minute with emphasis on temperature, sea level, and atmospheric carbon dioxide. Earth’s climate history shows dominant climate modes such as the supercontinent cycles, interglacial cycles, millennial cycles, multi-decadal oscillation, interannual oscillation, seasonal cycle and diurnal cycle. The amplitudes of the dominant climate variability generally decrease from the billion-year timescales to interannual timescales, then significantly increase at subannual to diurnal timescales.