The emerging story of a global climate shift a third of a billion years ago seems to be a prequel to what climate scientists expect from the current trend in global warming.

Using the same sort of Global Circulation Models as those which predict climate change today, University of Michigan researcher Christopher Poulsen and his colleagues have reproduced what might have happened on the supercontinent Pangea in the late Paleozoic era, about 300 million years ago, when the polar ice melted.