Growth of the Maritime Continent and its possible contribution to recurring Ice Ages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The areal extent of the Maritime Continent (the islands of Indonesia and surrounding region) has grown larger by ~60% since 5 Ma. We argue that this growth might have altered global climate in two ways that would have contributed to making recurring Ice Ages possible. First, because rainfall over the islands of the Maritime Continent not only is heavier than that over the adjacent ocean but also correlates with the strength of the Walker Circulation, the growth of the Maritime Continent since 5 Ma may have contributed to the cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific since that time. Scaling relationships between the strength of the Walker Circulation and rainfall over the islands of the Maritime Continent and between sea surface temperature (SST) of the eastern tropical Pacific and the strength of easterly wind stress suggest that the increase in areal extent of islands would lead to a drop in that SST of 0.75°C. Although only a fraction of the 3–4°C decrease in SSTs between the eastern and western tropical Pacific, the growth of the Maritime Continent may have strengthened the Walker Circulation, increased the east‐west temperature gradient across the Pacific and thereby enabled ice sheets to wax and wane over Canada since 3 Ma. Second, because the weathering of basaltic rock under warm, moist conditions extracts CO 2 from the atmosphere more rapidly than weathering of other rock or of basalt under cooler or drier conditions, the increase in weathering due to increasing area of basalt in the Maritime Continent may have drawn down enough CO 2 from the atmosphere to affect global temperatures. Simple calculations suggest that increased weathering of basalt might have lowered global temperatures by 0.25°C, possibly important for the overall cooling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".