Abrupt climate change not a rare event

Stalagmites, a Supervolcano, & 100K Years of Climate Data

Posted by Ross Pomeroy at Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:21:36

RealClearScience.com

Kim Cobb doesn't particularly enjoy spelunking. It's damp, dirty, often uncomfortable, and there's guano, lots of guano. Despite that fact, the Georgia Tech paleoclimatologist recently found herself studying stalagmites in the caves of northern Borneo.

Luckily, these caves weren't as dingy as others she's visited, and to top off the not-so-dreary experience, her team's work ended up being a complete success! By analyzing isotopes of oxygen stored in stalagmites, Cobb and her colleagues pieced together 100,000 years worth of past climate data from the Tropical Pacific. Their work has just been published in Science Express.

For the researchers, unraveling past climate secrets begins with rainfall. In Gunung Mulu and Gunung Buda National Parks in Borneo, raindrops seep down through cracks in the ground and eventually wind up dripping from cave roofs. Each splatter deposits a fractional amount of calcium carbonate on the subterranean floors, and in places where water drips repeatedly over many thousands of years, stalagmites slowly sprout, growing at a sloth-like pace of about one centimeter per millennium.

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