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What type of data does the Greenland ice core Project provide?
Greenland ice cores provide a high-quality high-resolution estimate of past changes in temperatures, allowing more precise comparisons with observed temperature records than most other climate proxies.
What data do ice cores provide?
Summary. Ice cores provide direct information about how greenhouse gas concentrations have changed in the past, and they also provide direct evidence that the climate can change abruptly under some circumstances.
What is the importance of the Greenland ice core Project gisp2 )?
The ice cores provide a proxy archive of temperature and atmospheric constituents that help to understand past climate variations. The preliminary GISP field work started in 1971 at Dye 3 (65°N 43°W), where a 372 meter deep, 10.2 cm diameter core was recovered.
What would be the data that scientists obtain from ice core study?
Ice cores have provided climate and ice dynamics information over many hundred thousand years in very high, sometimes seasonal, resolution. This information allows scientists to determine how and why climate changed in the past.
What is the purpose of ice cores?
Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled from ice sheets and glaciers. They are essentially frozen time capsules that allow scientists to reconstruct climate far into the past. Layers in ice cores correspond to years and seasons, with the youngest ice at the top and the oldest ice at the bottom of the core.
How do ice cores show evidence of climate change?
Ice cores. Scientists often use ice cores to detect changes in temperatures. When snow falls it traps air into the ice. When scientists take a core of ice it reveals the atmospheric gas concentrations at the time the snow fell.
Why are ice cores not reliable?
Cores with extensive melting are avoided for studies of past atmospheric composition, and even small amounts of meltwater are problematic for highly soluble gases such as CO2. However, the high CO2 concentration in the melt layers provides a tracer for diffusion.
How are ice cores stored?
The world’s major ice core storage facilities, such as the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility, store ice cores in large freezers at a temperature of around -36°C. Often, such facilities also house a slightly warmer (around -25°C) ‘examination room’ where scientists analyse the ice cores.
How does ice core data show climate change?
By looking at past concentrations of greenhouse gasses in layers in ice cores, scientists can calculate how modern amounts of carbon dioxide and methane compare to those of the past, and, essentially, compare past concentrations of greenhouse gasses to temperature. Ice coring has been around since the 1950s.
What can ice cores tell us about past environments?
Examining the patterns that we see in ice cores can tell us about the effects that changing climate, Earth processes, and human activity have had on our planet. Scientists can use these past patterns to create scientific models that help them predict what might happen in the future.
How old is the oldest ice core sample?
The oldest continuous ice core records extend to 130,000 years in Greenland, and 800,000 years in Antarctica.
What are the limitations of ice core data?
The main limitation of the ice-core data is that it is effectively a 10-year or longer running average, because air of slightly different ages is mixed together in firn layers – layers of compacted snow that falls in one year and survives unmelted to the following year – before the air is sealed off into bubbles in the …