New proxy data indicate sea surface temperatures at high southern latitudes reached over 35°C during a period of extreme greenhouse climate that began about 100 million years ago.
Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A 192,000-Year Record of Northwest African Fire History
Biomarker analyses from an offshore sediment core suggest that increased fire occurrence around 55,000 years ago coincided with increased fuel loads and human settlement in this region.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Baltic Bacterial Blooms Over the Millennia
Eutrophication not only is a present-day anthropogenic phenomenon in the southern Baltic but also occurred over the past few millennia, with cyanobacterial blooms during times of climate warming.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
What American Samoan Corals Tell About El Niño’s History
Samoan corals record how patterns of warm/cool and more/less salty in the equatorial Pacific changed in space and time over the last 500 years.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Tiny Marine Shells Reveal Past Patterns in Ocean Dynamics
A 400,000-year calcium carbonate record from the ocean floor sheds light on deep-ocean circulation and on mechanisms driving climate patterns and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Fossilized Caribbean Corals Reveal Ancient Summer Rains
Isotope records and climate modeling suggest that the rainy Intertropical Convergence Zone expanded northward into the southern Caribbean during a warm interglacial period about 125,000 years ago.
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How Ice Rafting Events Affect Asian Monsoon Hydroclimate
Cave stalagmites provide isotopic evidence that Bond events and Heinrich events have more variable effects on Asian monsoon hydroclimate during the last glacial period than during the Holocene.
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Medieval Temperature Trends in Africa and Arabia
A synthesis of paleotemperature reconstructions from published case studies suggests warm onshore temperatures persisted across most of Afro-Arabia between 1000 and 1200 CE.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Plotting the Pliocene Polar Front
Understanding changing conditions in the south polar oceans during the warm late Pliocene period may help predict the impact of contemporary warming.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
“North Pacific Nutrient Leakage” During Glacials
Carbon isotope data suggest an alternative source of nutrients to the Eastern Equatorial Pacific during glacial periods.