PLEA Network

9 November 2015, Science News, The past shows how abrupt climate shifts affect Earth. New research shows how past abrupt climatic changes in the North Atlantic propagated globally. The study, led by researchers from Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, shows how interaction between heat transport in the ocean and the atmosphere caused the climatic changes to be expressed in different ways across the Southern Hemisphere. The results shows how forcing the climate system into a different state can trigger climate variations that spread globally and have very different impacts in different regions of Earth. This is important now, where rising atmospheric CO2 levels lead to global warming and may trigger abrupt climatic changes. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. The history of climate on Earth is stored in tiny variations in kilometer-thick ice cores, sediments from lakes and oceans, and other natural archives that are layered down over thousands of years and works as archives of past temperatures. By recovering and deciphering these archives, researchers can reveal how and why the climate changed in the past, and in this way learn how the climate system may react in the future as the planet warms and the ice sheets melt. Read more here