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Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates. Since it is not possible to go back in time to see what climates were like, scientists use imprints created during past climate, known as proxies, to interpret paleoclimate. Organisms, such as diatoms, forams, and coral serve as useful climate proxies. Other proxies include ice cores, tree rings, and sediment cores (which include diatoms, foraminifera, microbiota, pollen, and charcoal within the sediment and the sediment itself).
The following description of the role of the study of stable isotopes in water and carbon dioxide molecules when constructing a record of Earth’s pattern of climate change is an excerpt from: Climate Change and Society.
From the ice sheets of Antarctica and the seabed of the Atlantic, to the boreal forests of Europe and corals of southeast Asia, proxy data is found across the Earth’s land and ocean.
NOAA holds an archive of more than 10,000 proxy datasets covering more than a dozen categories. With its permission, Carbon Brief has mapped this data.
Use the categories in the legend on the left to select a particular proxy or archive type, and the buttons in the top-right hand corner to zoom in and out. Clicking on an individual data point will reveal the period covered by the data, the site name and a link to NOAA’s reference webpage for further information.
A brief explanation of oxygen isotopes, and how the oxygen isotope signal can be used to study past climates.
A basic description of how Oxygen isotopes work in the Ice/Ocean system and how we use them as a proxy for global temperature.
HSC Earth and Environmental Science
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Marine sediments provide long continuous records of past climate changes at intra-annual, to centennial scale resolutions enabling insights into past changes within both oceanic and continental environments.
Isotopes are used to measure past climate properties. Deuterium and oxygen 18 are the most commonly used climate proxies. Lighter isotopes evaporate more readily from the ocean, so water vapor in the atmosphere is isotopically lighter than ocean water. This vapor gets lighter still as it is transported to higher latitudes while losing mass by precipitation. These processes leave an isotopic signal of temperature and continental ice volume in ice cores and deep sea sediment cores.
X he fundamental motivation for the recent explosion of interest in climate studies is the growing scientific concern that rapidly expanding human impact on the global ecosystem may significantly alter the world's climate in the near future.