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Antarctic and global climate history viewed from ice cores

Nature volume 558, pages 200–208 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

A growing network of ice cores reveals the past 800,000 years of Antarctic climate and atmospheric composition. The data show tight links among greenhouse gases, aerosols and global climate on many timescales, demonstrate connections between Antarctica and distant locations, and reveal the extraordinary differences between the composition of our present atmosphere and its natural range of variability as revealed in the ice core record. Further coring in extremely challenging locations is now being planned, with the goal of finding older ice and resolving the mechanisms underlying the shift of glacial cycles from 40,000-year to 100,000-year cycles about a million years ago, one of the great mysteries of climate science.

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Fig. 1: Data covering the last 800,000 years from long Antarctic ice core records, and the benthic isotope stack, a proxy for global glacial–interglacial cycles, with upward direction corresponding to warm interglacial conditions.
Fig. 2: Abrupt climate variability of the last Ice Age.
Fig. 3: Dependence of millennial-scale variability on the background climate state.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Pedro for comments that improved the manuscript. The US National Science Foundation and US Antarctic Program have provided support for our research and acquisition of Antarctic ice cores that we have studied; we thank them, as well as numerous international agencies and colleagues who have contributed to ice core science.

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Nature thanks J. Pedro and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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  1. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Edward J. Brook & Christo Buizert

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  1. Edward J. Brook
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The authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Edward J. Brook.

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Brook, E.J., Buizert, C. Antarctic and global climate history viewed from ice cores. Nature 558, 200–208 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0172-5

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