New Dating of Panama Formation Throws Cold Water on Ice Age Origin Ideas

Features | Energy & Sustainability

A geologist's revisionist theory pushing the formation of the Isthmus of Panama back 10 million years casts doubt on mainstream ideas of what caused the last ice age as well as the global glaciation cycle that generates the world's current climate

By Katie Worth ?| June 15, 2012?|

EARLIER ISTHMUS: The monumental excavations necessary to expand the Panama Canal have given scientists a rare chance to delve into Panama's ancient history. Image: Panama Canal Authority

A few years ago geologist Carlos Jaramillo stood in a man-made canyon in Panama staring at rocks he knew to be 20 million years old, and shook his head in confusion. According to conventional geologic theory, the Panamanian Isthmus didn't emerge from the sea until just a few million years ago. So what was a 20 million-year-old fossilized tree doing there?

A new body of data emerging from such questions threatens to upend what geologists thought they knew about our planet. The Isthmus of Panama plays an outsized role in ocean circulation and may be a reason that our planet currently undergoes ice ages, so the new theory could rewrite not just the history of continents and biology, but also global climate.

Science owes this research to an unlikely source: a public works project. Panama is expanding its namesake canal, which has required monumental excavations to accommodate the world's growing fleet of ships that are too large for the original channels. Those digs have exposed an abundance of ancient rocks across a land normally choked by jungle. Jaramillo, a staff geologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, is leading a team of about 40 scientists who are taking advantage of this brief opportunity to study the rocks before they again surrender to plants or water.

Until recently, scientific theory has dictated that up to about three million years ago, the Atlantic and Pacific formed a single wide and deep sea between the American continents. As continental plates collided, a chain of islands between the two rose up, forming the Isthmus of Panama and ending what preeminent 20th-century paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson famously described as South America's "splendid isolation."

But Jaramillo and his colleagues have proposed a new model: most of Panama existed as it does today 12 million years ago, with shallow, narrow channels connecting the two oceans periodically after that. The results are detailed in a recent issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin (pdf), with more details in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research (pdf).

The discrepancy between the two theories is no small matter. The three-million-year time frame neatly accounted for an important sequence of events that began about the same time. The current global cycle of glaciation dates to this period and might have been triggered by a transformation of the world's ocean currents, which a slender rib of land separating Atlantic and Pacific would naturally explain. New currents began carrying warmth to northern Europe and precipitation to the Arctic. The Atlantic grew saltier and warmer; the Pacific grew more nutrient-rich. Flora and fauna began traipsing between the two American continents, often extinguishing each other. In Africa a savanna formed, which may have nudged forward the evolution of our species.

So if the new theory is right, and the oceans were separated much earlier?then what triggered all of those epochal events?

"This is the most interesting for me, because if you tell somebody living in Nepal that the isthmus rises three million years ago versus 10 million?who cares?" Jaramillo says. "But think about this: having ice in the Arctic is the reason we're in the climate we are right now, and we still don't have a clear mechanism for it. That's very interesting, no? How can we even think about modeling the climate of the next 100 years if we cannot model how to produce such a big feature of our climate today?"

Climatologists will have to begin taking seriously alternative theories about why the ice ages began, says geologist Peter Molnar of University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. His favored alternative theory involves precipitation in Indonesia. "I think this will turn the field on its head," Molnar says.

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