PEI Faculty Seminar: “3 Million Years of Global Climate Change Captured in Ice Cores”

 

Michael Bender, Professor of Geosciences, Emeritus, and Senior Geoscientist, presented, “3 Million Years of Global Climate Change Captured in Ice Cores,” at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 3. Bender was the third speaker in the Spring 2018 PEI Faculty Seminar Series.

Summary: Ice cores collected by drilling through the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets preserve fossil air and chemical properties that reflect past climates. These records, which extend back 800,000 years, show that Antarctic temperatures and global climate were closely linked to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Recently, we successfully retrieved from Antarctica “chunks” of ice more than 2 million years old. These samples allow us to begin examining connections between climate and greenhouse gases at the time when glacial periods became increasingly intense, leading to the massive ice sheets associated with glacial periods of the past 800,000 years.

PEI Faculty Seminar: “3 Million Years of Global Climate Change Captured in Ice Cores”

Publish Date

April 3, 2018

Presenter(s)

Michael Bender

Link to Video

https://youtu.be/i1UZ2waEykQ

Video Length

00:53:30

 

Michael Bender, Professor of Geosciences, Emeritus, and Senior Geoscientist, presented, “3 Million Years of Global Climate Change Captured in Ice Cores,” at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 3. Bender was the third speaker in the Spring 2018 PEI Faculty Seminar Series.

Summary: Ice cores collected by drilling through the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets preserve fossil air and chemical properties that reflect past climates. These records, which extend back 800,000 years, show that Antarctic temperatures and global climate were closely linked to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Recently, we successfully retrieved from Antarctica “chunks” of ice more than 2 million years old. These samples allow us to begin examining connections between climate and greenhouse gases at the time when glacial periods became increasingly intense, leading to the massive ice sheets associated with glacial periods of the past 800,000 years.