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Climate change

Cornucopia of ice core results

Nature volume 399, pages 412–413 (1999)Cite this article

Natural archives of Earth's past climate take several forms — sea and lake sediments, tree rings, peat bogs and glacier ice — all of which are used in reconstructing climate history. But the records locked up in the large polar ice sheets are especially valuable. Cores of this ice not only allow reconstruction of changes in local temperature and precipitation, but also provide information about volcanic activity, storminess, solar activity and atmospheric composition.

Such records have already taken us back 150,000 years, a period covering about two glacial-interglacial cycles. Petit et al. ( page 429of this issue1) now extend the most important records to four climatic cycles — that is, to about 420,000 years BP(before present). This extension has been made possible because, last year, ice-core drilling at Vostok station in Antarctica reached a record depth of 3,623 m.Most notably, analysis of the core allows investigation of whether transitions from glacial epochs to interglacials, and back again, always follow the same pattern or whether a variety of mechanisms is involved.

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References

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  1. Bernhard Stauffer is at the Physics Institute, Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, Bern, CH-3012, Switzerland

    Bernhard Stauffer

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  1. Bernhard Stauffer
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Stauffer, B. Cornucopia of ice core results. Nature 399, 412–413 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/20807

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