Peatland formation is usually attributed to local hydrology — high water tables, low temperatures, acidic conditions that suppress decomposition. The peat accumulates where conditions prevent organic matter from rotting faster than it's produced. The story is local.
Fifteen thousand years ago, a sudden shift in the Southern Westerly Winds triggered rapid peat accumulation across the Southern Hemisphere. The mechanism was global: the wind shift altered the stirring of the Southern Ocean, changing the rate of CO₂ exchange between ocean and atmosphere, which in turn altered moisture and temperature patterns across continents, creating the conditions for explosive peat growth thousands of kilometers from the ocean.
The Southern Ocean is Earth's largest natural carbon sink. Its circulation is driven by wind. When the winds shifted, the ocean's ventilation changed — how much deep, CO₂-rich water was brought to the surface, how much atmospheric CO₂ was absorbed. The altered carbon cycle shifted climate patterns that shifted precipitation that shifted hydrology that built bogs.
A bog in Patagonia and a wind over the Southern Ocean are the same system viewed at different scales. The peat that formed 15,000 years ago didn't form because local conditions changed independently. It formed because a planet-scale atmospheric reorganization propagated through the ocean, through the carbon cycle, through regional climate, and arrived as a water table change in a valley that had no prior tendency to accumulate peat.
The causes of local ecology can be global. The bog doesn't know about the wind, but the wind built the bog.