Carbon dioxide emissions are rising at a higher rate than any time since the dinosaurs walked the earth, scientists have found in a new study.

Published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, the findings reveal that our planet's carbon release rates are higher right now than they've been in millions of years, and that's especially bad for our oceans.

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Vehicles drive through the smog on March 17, 2016 in Beijing, China.

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“Given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years,” the researchers wrote in the study.

The scientists looked at sediments off the New Jersey coast, as well as climate computer models, to gather more information about the organisms that lived and died during the period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Boundary (PETM). The PETM occurred about 56 million years ago, and during this period, average global temperatures rose as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists believe.

One reason for the temperature change was that there was a massive release of carbon dioxide, and because the oceans are known to absorb much of the greenhouse gas, acidity levels can spike and marine life is in danger of a widespread extinction event in a short amount of time.

The scientists studied the PETM because it's the time period that closest resembles what's happening now with carbon dioxide emissions, Richard Zeebe, study co-author from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Mashable. But during the PETM, the study found annual carbon emissions were about 1.1 billion tons, spread over 4,000 years. Currently, carbon emissions are about 10 billion tons per year.

The study connected the dots, and the scientists' findings paint a bad picture for the future of marine life.

“Future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM,” Zeebe told Reuters.

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