philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

High-fidelity record of Earth’s climate history puts current changes in context

The new findings, published September 10 in Science, are the result of decades of work and a large international collaboration. The challenge was to determine past climate variations on a time scale fine enough to see the variability attributable to orbital variations (in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the sun and the precession and tilt of its rotational axis).

Critical to compiling the new climate record was getting high-quality sediment cores from deep ocean basins through the international Ocean Drilling Program (ODP, later the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, IODP, succeeded in 2013 by the International Ocean Discovery Program). Signatures of past climates are recorded in the shells of microscopic plankton (called foraminifera) preserved in the seafloor sediments. After analyzing the sediment cores, researchers then had to develop an "astrochronology" by matching the climate variations recorded in sediment layers with variations in Earth's orbit (known as Milankovitch cycles).

Coauthors Steven Bohaty, now at the University of Southampton, and Kate Littler, now at the University of Exeter, both worked with Zachos at UC Santa Cruz. The paper's coauthors also include researchers at more than a dozen institutions around the world. This work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), European Union's Horizon 2020 program, National Science Foundation of China, Netherlands Earth System Science Centre, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

See the full story here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200910150313.htm

and with the actual chart

66 Million Years of Earth’s Climate History Uncovered – Puts Current Changes in Context