Paleoclimatology
Dead Corals Do Tell Tales
Sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, a tiny drifting larva found the perfect piece of real estate to settle down, on the shallow seafloor off the island of…
Sunspots, Sea Changes, and Climate Shifts
Natural materials such as shells, ice, corals, and tree rings contain clues to help scientists…
Lakes and Climates Have Their Ups and Downs
Between 5,400 and 3,000 years ago, something happened to New England’s climate. The region became…
Ocean Circulation and a Clam Far From Home
In my first year of graduate school, I was stumped by a big question on…
The Once and Future Circulation of the Ocean
The short history of modern oceanographic observations—less than a century’s worth, really—doesn’t give us a…
What Other Tales Can Coral Skeletons Tell?
In 2003, we traveled by ship to the New England Seamounts—a chain of extinct, undersea…
The Coral-Climate Connection
Are the climate changes we perceive today just part of the Earth system’s natural variability,…
Analyzing Ancient Sediments at Warp Speed
Like a toy out of a science fiction story, the X-ray fluorescence core scanner reveals…
An Ocean Warmer Than a Hot Tub
Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107°F (42°C)—about…
The Great Flood of New York
An ice dam forming a large Ice Age lake collapsed 13,350 years ago, sending a…
How the Isthmus of Panama Put Ice in the Arctic
The long lag time has always puzzled scientists: Why did Antarctica become covered by massive…
Moving Earth and Heaven
The mountains rise, are lashed by wind and weather, and erode. The rivers carry mud…
Shifting Continents and Climates
Sixty-five millions years ago, dinosaurs had just become extinct, and mammals were starting to dominate…
Ground-Truthing the Paleoclimate Record
Sediment Trap Observations Aid Paleoceanographers The geological record contains a wealth of information about Earth's…
Sedimentary Record Yields Several Centuries of Data
Natural climate changes like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period are of…