Where is Lake El’Gygytgyn? TV science special

WHERE IS LAKE EL’GYGYTGYN?  Monday, December 8th 2014, watch the FrontierScientists science special about drilling for ancient climate data by tuning in to 360 North. Watch over the air from Alaska, or watch online from anywhere in the world by visiting 360North.org at 5am UTC. This 30 minute installment features real scientists and their cutting edge work. […]

Julie Brigham-Grette Martin Melles

Inter-hemispheric climate coupling

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates. One of the many ways to study paleoclimatology is to collect a 2.5 inch [6.6 centimeter] wide tube of mud from a well-situated site. It’s amazing how much we can learn of Earth’s climate past – and what those findings teach us […]

Lake El'gygytgyn satellite space Russia

Data from an impact crater

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – There’s a place in Northeast Russia where, 3.6 million years ago, a meteorite slammed into Earth. A lake filled the crater. Today, the sediment that has settled at the bottom of Lake El-gygytgyn provides a rare preserved climate record: the longest sediment core record ever collected on land in […]

ice core drill

Proxy data from past climates

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – We can’t use time machines to go back and take the Earth’s temperature during ancient times, yet we need past records of climate data to help calculate Earth’s history, where we are now, and what our planet will look like going forward. Paleoclimatology studies ancient climates with the use […]

Orbital dynamics and climate

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – Cyclical changes in the way the Earth circumnavigates the Sun can influence Earth’s climate. Last week, we looked at Milankovitch’s assessments of orbital dynamics, including: orbital eccentricity, Earth’s tilt or obliquity, and the precession or change in orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation which determines what direction each […]

orbital variance seasons

Earth’s orbital dynamics

In the 1930s, Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch theorized that slow changes in the way the Earth moves through space about the Sun could have influenced our planet’s climate past. The Earth has experienced a string of ice ages in the past, interrupted by shorter, warmer, interglacial periods. How –and how much– have the Earths’ orbital […]