This article explores the range of methods available to analyse ice and deep-sea sediment cores. It also explores the value of such cores in the context of reconstructing a record of Quaternary climate change, or paleoclimatic reconstruction. Paleoclimatic reconstruction is an extremely important and ...
The plants that grow in the soil show how climates have changed. During past glaciations much of the northern hemisphere was covered in ice. As vegetation shifted south in response to this, places like the Mediterranean were a glacial refugia. These areas remained ice free during ice ages and...
000 years of Earth's climate history. Joshua Garland, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how his team uses information theory to quickly flag which portions of massive data set stand out. Credit: Antarctica and ice core processing footage provided by the National Science Foundatio...
Over the past 810,000 years (you’re too young to remember), global temperature reconstructed by Jouzel et al. (2007) from Greenland ice cores has varied by little more than your thermostat at home allows when the heating is on. That is how near-perfectly thermostatic the climate ...
Here we show how major rivers can efficiently connect to the deep-sea, by analysing the longest runout sediment flows (of any type) yet measured in action on Earth. These seafloor turbidity currents originated from the Congo River-mouth, with one flow tr
At depth, the team utilized modified push cores, or injector cores, to infuse a portion of the samples with a preservative (visible with red dye). These were then brought to the surface for gene-expression analyses to determine their metabolic pathways. Credit Ocean Exploration Trust, NOAA Ocea...
The warmth of the Eocene can't be explained by carbon dioxide effects alone, and ice cores reveal a key role for greenhouses gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, produced by bacteria. The limits of our climate models here suggest that current greenhouse models are missing key elements, ...
Global surface temperature change over the past 810,000 years, obtained by halving (to correct the result for polar amplification) the temperature anomalies inferred from atmospheric δ18O ratios in ice cores from Vostok station, Antarctica. Absolute global temperature has varied by little more than...
of the ice age. The purpose of this research was to understand how a drying climate, predicted for this region, might regulate long-term SOC sequestration. To examine the effects of decreasing water availability, we compared soil parameters and processes in three categories of forest that ...
There are two ways of working out the value ofclimate sensitivity, used in combination. One involves modelling, the other calculates the figure directly from physical evidence, by looking atclimate changes in the distant past, as recorded for example in ice-cores, in marine sediments and numerous...