Latest Ice core Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists, led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Amherst, has analyzed the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic to provide “absolutely new knowledge” of Arctic climate from 2.2 million to 3.6 million years ago. "While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of...

1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction A new 1000-year Antarctic Peninsula climate reconstruction shows that summer ice melting has intensified almost ten-fold, and mostly since the mid 20th Century. Summer ice melt affects the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers. The research, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, adds new knowledge to the international effort that is required to understand the causes of environmental change in Antarctica and...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the debate over climate change continues, so does the publication of studies that support or challenge the notion that human activity is the main driver of rising temperatures. According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the dramatic thinning of glaciers in Western Antarctica is due to natural variation, and cannot be attributed directly to carbon emissions. "If we could look back at this region of Antarctica in the 1940s...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Earth's tropical climate history has been revealed in unprecedented detail – year by year, for almost 1,800 years – by two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes. In 2003, a research team led by Ohio State University retrieved core samples from a Peruvian ice cap. They noticed some startling similarities to ice cores they had gathered from Tibet and the Himalayas. Even though the cores were taken from...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Not cleaning a kitty’s litter box could be a disgusting thought for cat owners, but for Brian Chase of Montpellier University in France — layers of dried urine can reveal exciting new details about an environment as they stack up year after year and generation after generation. Instead of learning about the historical habitat of the common housecat, Chase and his colleagues from the European Research Council analyzed layers of...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research findings based on Greenland ice cores show that if climate change patterns repeat themselves, the Earth will become much warmer and sea levels will rise significantly. In a new report published in the latest edition of the journal Nature, scientists have used Greenland ice cores over 1.5 miles long to collect data on the Eemian period, around 115 to 130 thousand years ago. An analysis of the cores allowed the international...

National Science Foundation Drilling-related breakthroughs funded by NSF expected to advance "frontier science" in a variety of disciplines Three very large-scale, National Science Foundation-funded Antarctic science projects--investigating scientifically significant subjects as varied as life in extreme ecosystems, the fate of one of the world's largest ice sheets and the nature of abrupt global climate-change events--have recently each reached important technological milestones that...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A rapid response between global temperatures and ice volume/sea-level that could lead to sea-levels rising by over 3 feet have been revealed by a new study from the University of Southampton. Global ice-volume variability has been one of the main feedback mechanisms in climate change during the last few million years. This is because of the strong reflective properties of large ice sheets. Scientists reconstruct ice volume...

41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occured. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north. Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North...

[ Watch the Video: National Ice Core Lab Stores Valuable Ancient Ice ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online While temperatures across the country start to cool in accordance to the changing of seasons, there is one place in Denver, Colorado where it stays cool all year round. Colorado experienced record highs this summer, but the National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL) was one place in the state that stayed well below hot, at minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The...