Professor Ian Plimer

The geological cycles are over 400 million years, and that's when we pull apart or stitch back together the continents.

And it's the position of the continents that really does drive your climate.

Really?

Well, it's plate tectonics.

It's pulling apart, and you have fractures going deep into the earth.

These fractures leak out molten rock, which has to cool down, and they leak out carbon dioxide.

We've got that process happening right now in the mid-ocean ridges.

We have about 70,000 kilometres of mid-ocean ridges.

We're leaking out carbon dioxide out of the basalts there.

We have about 3.4 million old volcanoes on the ocean floor that we've been able to measure.

We know that there's a... Volcanologists will give us a very strong correlation between a swarm of earthquakes, which means molten rock is rising, and degassing and putting carbon dioxide into seawater.

It doesn't bubble up because it dissolves.

And when that carbon dioxide is a basalt...

lava or volcano erupts on the sea floor, then you have to cool it down.

You cool it down with seawater.

And one cubic kilometre of molten basalt is at 1200 degrees Celsius.

If you cool that, that's enough energy for 30 hurricanes.

So there's this thought in the volcanological area that maybe El Niños are related to the movement of molten rock beneath the oceans.

and that that's got to be cooled down and that gives you warm water above.

So we've got this 400 million year cycle.