2,000 Year Old Ice Core

Scientists have recently successfully drilled into a 2,000 year old ice core in Antarctica, and can now directly observed how much the climate has evolved. In these ice cores scientists are able to receive information about previous climates using the chemistry of the air that was caught in the snow and ice. Ice cores are a very useful tool in paleoclimatology. From these little pieces of ice you can find our the solar radiation, volcanic activity and even storm events that occurred in the previous climates. Analyzing this cored will help scientists understand the series of ice ages and warm periods that occurred in the past. For more information about this drill you can read it here.

Source: AFP. "Polar Scientists Drill 2,000-year-old Ice Core : DNews." DNews. N.p., 8 May 2014. Web. 28 May 2014.

Paleoclimatology

Paleoclimatology was always interesting to me, because it was a really cool way to determine the past's climate. At this website you can learn more about the different proxies that they use like tree rings and ice cores. Tree rings and ice cores have a lot in common when it comes to reading them, because they each have layers that scientists can analyze and record. These layers are periodic and allow the findings to be ordered into a chronological order.

Source: "Climate Data Information." Ice Cores. Web. 17 May 2014.

High Profile Scientific Publications

Here is my document discussing the publication by Marcott et al. and how it was interpreted in the media.

Tree Rings

Tree rings are one of the many proxies used to estimate the past's climate changes. As a tree grows in a year it produces a new ring, which varies in width allowing us to estimate the climate due to how much the tree grew. The trees that we focus on are normally found in a temperate climate, where they have a dry season. The trees that do not have a dry season end up growing year round and that makes it hard to determine any climate changes because the rings are not defined to one per year. The trees growth are influenced by precipitation, temperature, sunlight and wind. All of these factors can help us determine the climate of that specific growing season. Trees can grow for thousands of years and hold data from all of the past climates. When the tree rings are thicker that normally points toward a climate that favors the growth of the trees, while having narrow means the opposite. With the amount of data that has been collected scientists are able to estimate from hundreds to thousands of years in the past locally. By combining this proxy with other proxies scientists have been able to estimate regional and global climates.

Climate Change Videos

For the first video, located here, I feel as though the main take home message was that before humans were involved, there was a clear pattern that the Earth was going through. The globe would cool down and have an inter glacial period and then warm back up. Then from that point on it would cool down until another ice age occurred, and this pattern continued. Since humans have been involved, the amount of CO2 in the air has sky rocketed, and doesn't look like it is going to shrink any time soon.

In the second video, which you can find here, the sole purpose of this video also seemed to be toward end. With all of the data that paleoclimatologists gather from proxies such as corals, ice cores and tree rings the temperature of the globe is still hotter than the past thousand years. Even with the room for error, this still holds true. Between the first and the second video, there is a strong motif of the fact that the planet is a little off it's regular course.

The main idea for the third video, found here, seemed to be that the climate of the environment around lakes impact the lake itself. When the climate is warmer it effects the plants and their growth as well as the particles that are spread into the water.When these are measured you are able to find out information about the environment during a specific time period.

Paleoclimatology

What is paleoclimatology? 
Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates. By determining what had happened in the past, scientist hope to understand better what the future may hold for us.

How is it studied? 
You can find different chemical and physical alterations around the world that show the previous climates and how the ocean land and air were affected. Some of the things studied are able to determine a characteristic that is world wide and others are for specific regions. "Proxy" records is the name of the things that scientists find in the environment. Proxy records are the records found in tree rings, in the skeletons of the coral reef, ice cores from glaciers and sediments buried in the ocean and land.

Why is it studied?
Studying this helps scientists reconstruct the past in order to help determine what may happen in the future or with human influence. It has already been previously shown using paleoclimatology that the Earth's climate can dramatically change within a matter of decades. Paleoclimatology also shows us the human influence that already exists on the Earth.