By looking into the past, a researcher is trying to understand how animals might adapt to global warming now.

Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been studying a climate warming event of 55 million years ago. Although there seemed to be major extinctions in the deep ocean, he said, that ancient climate change wasn't as detrimental for animals on land.

“It allowed animals to migrate,for example, from Central Europe over to North America. We have the first record of horses in north America, the first record of primates in North America associate with this episode of global warming. And so, a lot of species spread all over the planet when their northern migration routes were opened up by becoming much warmer.”

But, he said, 55 million years ago there was no large human presence on the planet, and that's important.

“Back then, organisms could freely move around, because we weren't in the way. We build highways and cities and agricultural land and all sorts of things that interfere with the migration of organisms. So it's quite plausible that there will be much heavier extinction from this particular episode of global warming than occurred in the past.”

Join the on-going conversation about global warming at our website at earthsky.org. Our thanks today to NASA: explore, discover, understand. We're Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.