Our understanding of how Earth maintains its own body leaves much to be desired.
They discovered proof of a pattern in which Earth's temperature extremes are tempered over thousands of years.
Up to this point, there was no concrete proof of this feedback.

The Earth's climate has changed significantly due to a number of factors, including solar radiation fluctuations, ice ages that cooled the planet, and global volcanism. Yet life has persisted for the past 3.7 billion years. A 'stabilising feedback' process that functions over hundreds of thousands of years to bring the climate back from the edge and maintain global temperatures within a constant, habitable range has now been confirmed by new research by MIT scientists. On November 16, the study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

How does Earth manage to do this, exactly? Silicate weathering, a geological process in which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that eventually suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks, is one possible explanation.

Silicate weathering is thought to be a crucial factor in controlling the Earth's carbon cycle, contrary to long-held researcher beliefs. A geologically constant force that controls carbon dioxide levels and world temperatures may be provided by the silicate weathering mechanism. But up until this point, there hasn't been any concrete proof that such a feedback is still in operation.

Based on an examination of paleoclimate data that document variations in average global temperatures over the previous 66 million years, the new conclusions were made.

In order to determine whether the data showed any patterns resembling stabilising phenomena that controlled world temperatures on a geologic timescale, the MIT team conducted a mathematical study.

They discovered that, over periods of hundreds of thousands of years, there does indeed seem to be a constant pattern in which the Earth's temperature oscillations are tamed. This effect's lifespan is comparable to the timeframes predicted for silicate weathering. By examining data on global temperature changes throughout geologic history, Arnscheidt and Rothman aimed to confirm if a stabilising feedback had in fact been at work.

They used a variety of global temperature records obtained by previous researchers, including preserved Antarctic ice cores and data on the chemical make-up of prehistoric marine fossils and shells. In order to find patterns in datasets with a lot of variation, the team applied stochastic differential equations, a mathematical theory, using the data.

Temperature fluctuations should increase with time without stabilising feedbacks. However, the team's investigation identified a regime in which fluctuations did not increase, suggesting that a stabilising mechanism was in place before fluctuations became excessive. The hundreds of thousands of years predicted by scientists for silicate weathering coincide with the timescale for this stabilising effect.