A new study reveals shocking results how carbon is now being released at 10 times faster than ever before, not only since humans began to track the atmosphere in the 19th century but in the past 66 million years.

Researchers from the Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii reveal that carbon that is now being expelled into the atmosphere and oceans is now considered as the most dramatic global change ever, since dinosaurs walked the Earth.

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Prior to this, scientists believed that a climate event that occurred some 56 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) released the highest carbon levels in history. However, in this new study, researchers measured that PETM's carbon levels were less than this current human caused carbon release into the atmosphere.

Researchers have estimated the following driving factors such as speed of carbon being released, the speed of the planet's warming by analyzing the chemical and biological properties of sediment cores from PETM along with carbon cycles, and finally, Earth's overall climate. With this new method, the team was able to determine sediment record change rates without the need of using a sediment age model.

In 2014, the all time high for carbon input reached 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while carbon release rates during the PETM was apparently just a tenth of that total estimate or around 4 billion tons of yearly carbon dioxide release.

According to Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii, since carbon release rates this time has been unprecedented in a span of millions of years during the planet's history, this is now known as humans entering a "no analog" state. This now represents a big problem in projecting future climate changes since there are no good comparisons from the past. 

Researchers cannot predict the effects of massive amounts of carbon dioxide to humans since this has not yet occurred before. To date, they are continuing their research about PETM for more crucial insight about the planet's climate along with other global events like ocean acidification and the effects of it on marine life during PETM, leading to more information about current warming of oceans.

This new study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.