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This Stunning Graphic Shows Earth’s Temperature Over 22,000 Years

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7 years ago

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Climate change is a touchy subject, and it’s something that we only approach with the utmost deliberation and care.

However, as simple or as light-hearted as it appears at first glance, today’s infographic actually provides an invaluable amount of context on a subject that is often mired in the ugly details of mathematical models, multipliers, and policy implications.

Earth’s Temperature Over 22,000 Years

Today’s infographic from XKCD shows the Earth’s temperature since the last ice age glaciation, which was 22,000 years ago. It was around this time that there were vast ice sheets covering North America, northern Europe, and Asia.

Earth's Temperature Over 22,000 Years

This infographic does two things very well.

First, it gives us an idea of temperature changes over time in a relatable fashion, but it also gives us a sense of time scale.

Temperature Changes in Context

Temperatures were cold at the end of the last glaciation, which was around 20,000 BCE – about 4°C cooler than they were during the modern era. Boston and New York would have been covered in thick ice at that time.

Fast-forward half of the span of the infographic, and temperatures have increased to near modern levels (the average between 1961-1990) in about 11,000 years. This would have been around 9,000 BCE, which is around the time the very first humans started farming way back in today’s Middle East region.

From there, temperatures continue to increase for another 4,000 years, peaking around the time that the wheel was invented. This was around 5,000 BCE, which is still considered to be the end of the Stone Age. This is an era still well before the Ancient Egyptians rose to prominence.

The Earth cools again. By the time of the birth of Jesus, temperatures are close again to to those in the modern era. It continues to cool until Shakespearian times, which were in the middle of what is called the “Little Ice Age”.

Finally, after the Industrial Revolution, temperatures spike at a rate not seen before. In the short span of just a century or so, temperatures are back at their previous peak that occurred when the wheel was invented – roughly 7,000 years ago.

Sources used: Shakun et al (2012), Marcott et al (2013), Annan and Hargreaves (2013), HadCRUT4, IPCC,

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The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining

Gold has a long history as a precious metal, but just how many carbon emissions does mining it contribute to?
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Published

4 weeks ago

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May 2, 2023

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Published • Updated •
The following content is sponsored by Nature's Vault

The Carbon Emissions of Gold Mining

As companies progress towards net-zero goals, decarbonizing all sectors, including mining, has become a vital need.

Gold has a long history as a valuable metal due to its rarity, durability, and universal acceptance as a store of value. However, traditional gold mining is a process that is taxing on the environment and a major contributor to the increasing carbon emissions in our atmosphere. 

The above infographic from our sponsor Nature’s Vault provides an overview of the global carbon footprint of gold mining.

The Price of Gold

To understand more about the carbon emissions that gold mining contributes to, we need to understand the different scopes that all emissions fall under.

In the mining industry, these are divided into three scopes.

  • Scope 1: These include direct emissions from operations.
  • Scope 2: These are indirect emissions from power generation.
  • Scope 3: These cover all other indirect emissions.

With this in mind, let’s break down annual emissions in CO2e tonnes using data from the World Gold Council as of 2019. Note that total emissions are rounded to the nearest 1,000.

ScopeTypeCO2e tonnes
1Mining, milling, concentrating and smelting45,490,000
2Electricity54,914,000
3Suppliers, goods, and services25,118,000
1,2,3Recycled Gold4,200
3Jewelry828,000
3Investment4,500
3Electronics168
TOTAL 126,359,000

Total annual emissions reach around 126,359,000 CO2e tonnes. To put this in perspective, that means that one year’s worth of gold mining is equivalent to burning nearly 300 million barrels of oil.

Gold in Nature’s Vault

A significant portion of gold’s downstream use is either for private investment or placed in banks. In other words, a large amount of gold is mined, milled, smelted, and transported only to be locked away again in a vault.

Nature’s Vault is decarbonizing the gold mining sector for both gold and impact investors by eliminating the most emission-intensive part of the mining process—mining itself.

By creating digital assets like the NaturesGold Token and the Pistol Lake NFT that monetize the preservation of gold in the ground, emissions and the environmental damage associated with gold mining are avoided.

How Does it Work?

Through the same forms of validation used in traditional mining by Canada’s National Instrument NI 43-101 and Australia’s Joint Ore Reserve Committee (JORC), Nature’s Vault first determines that there is gold in an ore body.

Then, using blockchain and asset fractionalization, the mineral rights and quantified in-ground gold associated with these mineral rights are tokenized.

This way, gold for investment can still be used without the emission-intensive process that goes into mining it. Therefore, these digital assets are an environmentally-friendly alternative to traditional gold investments.

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Click here to learn more about gold in Nature’s Vault.

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