Читать книгу Reconstructing Earth's Climate History - Kristen St. John - Страница 15

This chapter serves as an introduction to paleoclimate records. In Part 1.1, you will compare and contrast the temporal and spatial scope of five major paleoclimate archives: tree rings, speleothems, glacial ice, lake and marine sediments, and sedimentary rocks. In Part 1.2, you will consider the challenges and strategies for obtaining cores from terrestrial and marine settings. You will also consider issues of sampling, reproducibility, resolution, and cost, which are common issues for all paleoclimate archive research. In Part 1.3, you will read about the 780 000 yr‐long. Owens Lake core record, and create a summary figure to synthesize the paleoclimatic data and interpretations.

Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1 Compare and contrast tree ring, speleothem, glacial ice, lake sediment, marine sediment, and sedimentary rock paleoclimate archives.

2 Provide a rationale for which archive(s) would be best suited for different spatial and temporal constraints and scientific objectives.

3 Identify the challenges and strategies for obtaining cores from terrestrial and marine settings.

4 Explain why unique sample identification is essential and how that is achieved, as well as the importance of reproducibility, and how it can be achieved.

5 Calculate accumulation rates and explain how sample resolution is affected by accumulation rates.

6 Describe the 780 000 yr‐long. Owens Lake sedimentary record, including the methods of age determination, the types of data collected, and a time‐line interpretation made of the paleoclimatic and environmental changes it has recorded (both naturally caused and human‐influenced). This serves as a case study of the science that can be derived from a paleoclimatic archive.