1. Researcher Goes to Prove the Climatic
Changes of World Going Back Two Million
Years
Researcher Carolyn Snyder goes to prove the climatic changes of the Earth going back
to almost two million years
As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder went
around the world to create a reconstruction. A reconstruction comprising of sea
surface temperature proxies from across the globe, such as ratios between magnesium
and calcium, species makeup and acidity ranging over million years ago through
collection of a set of proxy data taken from a geographically diverse set of locations.
She took data from 59 different ocean sediment cores, which were used to calculate
20,000 individual ocean temperature data points. Her tremendous amount of data
gives her one reading per century over two million years.
The temporal resolution of the reconstruction is only about 1,000 years which can pick
out the glacial cycles. On the contrary to the 40,000 years circle, Snyder calculated the
data to accommodate the mid-Pleistocene transition which is when the climate
underwent a transition. Earlier, it was going through glacial cycles every 40,000 years,
but it shifted to taking 100,000 years to cycle. According to Snyder’s calculations, the
climate was colder for the first million years and then the cooling trend began to slow
down. It eventually flattened out and the overall global average temperature remained
stable through to the present, even as glacial cycles caused lots of fluctuations around
that average.
Snyder has also predicted that the doubling of the temperature over time is a cause for
concern for everyone. This theory of hers is already been challenged by many of the
other researchers who admit that while her work is staggering and iconic in the world
of climatic study, the duration and exemption of many variables from the estimation
process make the forthcoming predictions somewhat questionable. Snyder’s study has
been published in the journal Nature. She is also now a climate policy official at the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
