Discovery of 1,800-Year-Old 'Rosetta Stone' for Tropical Ice Cores

[unhappycamper]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142417.htm



his photo from a 1977 expedition to Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru shows clearly defined annual layers of ice and dust visible in the ice cap's margin. Researchers at the Ohio State University are using a set of ice cores taken from Quelccaya as a "Rosetta Stone" for studying other ice cores taken from around the world.

Discovery of 1,800-Year-Old 'Rosetta Stone' for Tropical Ice Cores

Apr. 4, 2013 — Two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth's tropical climate history in unprecedented detail -- year by year, for nearly 1,800 years.

Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet.

In the April 4, 2013 online edition of the journal Science Express, they describe the find, which they call the first annually resolved "Rosetta Stone" with which to compare other climate histories from Earth's tropical and subtropical regions over the last two millennia.

~snip~

"These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date," said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the study.

[IrishAyes]

1. Difficult as it sometimes can be,

I'm still glad to be alive at this time in history to see such amazing discoveries, and glad for the internet to be able to enjoy them. Thanks for the post.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Study them fast, they'll be gone before long. nt