Latest Quaternary glaciation Stories

CO2 levels explain why temperatures in tropical and arctic waters have risen and fallen together for the past 2.7 million yearsIncreasingly, the Earth's climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Niño, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.Now, a research team led by Brown University has established that the climate in the tropics over at least the last 2.7 million...

Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository "“ something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern...

Researchers evaluate climate fluctuations from 115,000 years agoAt the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses...

The seriousness of current global warming is underlined by a reconstruction of climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula over approximately the last 14,000 years, which appears to show that the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice are unprecedented."At no time during the last 14 thousand years was there a period of climate warming and loss of ice as large and regionally synchronous as that we are now witnessing in the Antarctic...

The 'Coastland Map' produced by scientists from Durham University and published in the Journal GSA Today, charts the post Ice-Age tilt of the UK and Ireland and current relative sea-level changes. According to the map, the sinking effect in the south could add between 10 and 33 per cent to the projected sea-level rises caused by global warming over the next century. *The projections are less than previous estimations for subsidence and could help local authorities to save money on sea and...

A new international research effort on the Greenland ice sheet with the University of Colorado at Boulder as the lead U.S. institution set a record for single-season deep ice-core drilling this summer, recovering more than a mile of ice core that is expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate change in the future.The project, known as the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, is being undertaken by 14 nations and is led by the University of Copenhagen. The...

 Researchers have largely put to rest a long debate on the underlying mechanism that has caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years "“ they are ultimately linked to slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in Earth's rotation and axis.In a publication to be released Friday in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions conclude that the known wobbles in Earth's rotation caused global ice levels to reach...

Study offers detailed look at past greenhouse gas levelsResearchers have reconstructed atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet, shedding new light on its role in the earth's cycles of cooling and warming.The study, in the June 19 issue of the journal Science, is the latest to rule out a drop in CO2 as the cause for earth's ice ages growing longer and more intense some 850,000 years ago. But it also confirms many researchers' suspicion that...

Team investigates the climate of Planet Earth 440 million years agoGeologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief "˜blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years.They have published their findings and are due to discuss them at a public lecture at the University on Wednesday June 17.Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation...

In 1996, an international team of scientists led by the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) started to carry out a paleontological survey in the cave of El Mirón. Since then they have focused on analysing the fossil remains of the bones and teeth of small vertebrates that lived in the Cantabrian region over the past 41,000 years, at the end of the Quaternary. The richness, great diversity and good conservation status of the fossils have enabled the researchers to carry out a paleoclimatic...