Research

Highlights

Animations of Antarctic ice sheet changes over 10 million years

Antarctic ice sheet

Dr. David Pollard, along with his collegues, has run several model simulations of the Antarctic climate from the last 10 million years. By studying the dramatic changes from past eras, he seeks to better understand the response of Antarctic ice to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
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Phytoplankton bounce back from abrupt climate change

Dr. Timothy BralowerThe majority of tiny marine plants weathered the abrupt climate changes that occurred in Earth’s past and bounced back, according to a Penn State geoscientist. "Populations of plankton are pretty resilient," says Timothy J. Bralower, department head and professor of geosciences. Bralower looked at cores of marine sediments related to thousands of years of deposition, to locate populations of these plankton during three periods of abrupt climate change.
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Testing the Fidelity of Climate Reconstruction Methods

Proxy reconstructionDr. Michael Mann and his collegues, in a recently published paper, reconstructed past climate histories using the two most common techiques for processing "proxy" climate data. Climate Field Reconstruction (CFR, well suited for spatial patterns) and Composite-Plus-Scale (CPS, with a simpler statistical procedure) methods are used in this study. Results are tested for long-term fidelity against climate model simulations.
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EOS article highlights research of two ESSC scientists

Global SalintyA computer simulation suggests that circulation of the world's oceans, known as the "global conveyor," may depend on slight differences in salt concentrations between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans. In their experiments, Dan Seidov and Bernd Haupt modeled the movement of ocean waters over 10,000 years.
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GRL Article Highlighted by AGU

AMO FigureThe Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is a pattern of multi-decadal surface temperature variability centered on the North Atlantic Ocean, seen in analyses of global climate using measurements dating back to the 19th century.
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