Paleoclimatology is the study of ancient climates. This allows scientists to figure out that global warming really is out of the ordinary.

Data Sources

Cores and Rings

Cores are taken from arctic ice, and rock. Cores are long cylinders drilled out of the ground. Trees and sea coral are sampled too, in different ways. All of these things are like nature’s history records.

Ice Cores

Scientists can test the layers of ice to find out the approximate quantity of different sorts of gasses that were in the air. These gasses are stored in little pockets or bubbles in the ice. There is generally about 1 layer of ice for every year, and using the traces of gasses trapped in the ice, along with anything else in the ice, they can calculate the average weather of each individual year. They can also measure the plant growth of each year by the amount of pollen found in each layer. The thickness of a layer allows paleoclimatologists to calculate how much precipitation occurred over the course of a particular year. Ice cores can also contain rock powder ground up by glaciers, and volcanic ash.

Core Samples

Core samples are drilled out of rock, generally metamorphic rock formed from sedimentary rock. They show the layers of sediment that were laid down, and often have fossils which give clues as to what sorts of plants and animals lived during that time. Core samples are also used to record plate tectonic action from a long time ago. For example, is a plate has folded over, there would be a pattern in the rock layer that repeats itself backwards. If something more complex happened, such as the rock being twisted, they can take more core samples nearby to figure it out.

Tree Rings

Every year, trees put on a new ring. Depending on the climate, soil acidity, and other factors such as the type of tree, the rigs differ from one another. A year when a tree had plenty of water is likely to be lightly coloured and wider than times when there where little water. If the soil was to acidic, the tree ring will probably be a darker brown. Petrified tree rings allow scientists to investigate climates over a longer time period. Petrified tree rings are dated using radioactive dating methods.

Coral Rings

Coral rings are read basically the same as tree rings, except they respond to different things, such as the water temperature and wave action. From this source, certain equipment can be used to derive the sea surface temperature and water salinity from the past few centuries. Click Here to learn more about coral reefs.

Other Data Sources

Similar to cores and rings, these also allow data collection about the climate and other aspects of the earth’s history.

Borehole

The term ‘borehole’ is used to refer to a narrow shaft drilled into the earth’s crust. Data collected from boreholes are a measure of the immediate temperature from the boreholes.

Equipment

Drilling Equipment

Drilling Rig

Drilling rigs come in many shapes and sizes. The ones used for drilling boreholes and cores are the large sort. The machine drops rods, on a drill string of steel cable, with abrasive diamond bits on the end into the ground while rotating the drill string. They generally drill down from around 1200 meters to 1800 meters. The drilling is continued by adding more of the hollow drilling rods onto the steel wire. Since the rods for diamond drilling are quite expensive (as they use diamonds as an abrasive) the diamond rigs have to drill more slowly than other drilling rigs. Core samples are removed from the ground using a lifter tube, a hollow tube that is lowered through the drilling rods with the use of a winch cable. The core sample can then be lifted out.

Analyzing Equipment

Global Climate Models (or GCMs)

Global Climate Models (AKA General Circulation Models) are used to predict weather a week into the future to the climate 60 to 100 years into the future. These models are generated by supercomputers with massive amounts of data stored on them, but they are not always accurate. To have a perfect climate model, the computer would need to know about every single living thing on the earth, as well as astronomical patterns outside the earth, know when any animal died, any plant sprouted, any tree was cut down, and about all the species that humans have not yet discovered. They would also need to know the whole history of the earth’s climate. This is where paleoclimatology comes in. To make climate models more accurate, data from cores, boreholes, and rings, are put into the computers which generate them. The first GCMs were created by Sykuro Manabe and Kirk Bryan at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

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