An international team of researchers has created a new climate reference curve by reconstructing the Earth’s climate since the end of the Cretaceous period using data obtained from sediment cores from the ocean floor.
The team of global experts, including Professor Paul Wilson from the University of Southampton, have compiled and analysed a comprehensive data set from deep sea sediment cores to produce a sort of ‘barcode-in-colour’ that shows how Earth’s climate and its carbon cycle have changed since the demise of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. Their findings are published in Science (https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aba6853).
The record of past climate and carbon cycle changes was dated by matching the pattern of high frequency changes in the sediments to rhythmic changes in Earth’s solar orbit calculated by astronomers. Like a metronome, these orbit fluctuations have dictated the cyclic patterns of climate change. By identifying these astronomical cycles in the data, the climate of the past 66 million years has now been timed continuously for the first time, allowing it to be dated much more accurately than ever before.
In the future, the new data set will serve as a basis for researchers worldwide to accurately correlate their results within the context of climate history. The authors emphasise that this is fundamental for testing the reliability of climate models for the future.
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Image via University of Southampton.