Saturday, December 03, 2005

1 Million year global temperature variations with fossil record

I found a paper that reconstructs temperate variation back over 5 million years using corings from seafloor sedimentation layers and measures variations in O18 isotope. (Specifically this paper offers aligned averages of a 57 corings from different locations.)

Source data:
http://www.lorraine-lisiecki.com/stack.html LR04 Benthic Stack
http://www.lorraine-lisiecki.com/LR04stack_corrected2.txt

This is a graph (below) only goes back 1 million years to compare (and slightly extend the ice core graph following further down.)

I gave up trying to label the highs and lows with named glacial periods. Instead I counted back Interglacials with I1,I2... and Glacials with G1,G2,...

Comparing to the CO2 graph demonstrates to a strong connection between the two, even if not perfectly related in variations. So (G7), the "Nebraskian glacial period" was the oldest BIG glacial cycle around 620,000-680,000 years ago.

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