|
|
|
|
Two Miles Under
08/06/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global
Climate Change. Scientists are looking to climates of the past to understand why the
planet is appears to be warming so rapidly today. They analyze samples from the two
mile deep Greenland ice sheet, where the climate record exists for every year for the
past 110 thousand years.
Deb Meese, a paleo-climatologist, studies these ice cores at the Army Corp of
Engineers, Cold Regions Laboratory, in Hanover, NH. Meese says the ice cores show
evidence that temperature changes during the last glacial period sometimes occurred
very rapidly. Such information helps us understand what's happening today.
DM: We talk about a one or two degree change as being almost catastrophic for our
ecosystem, our environment, for agriculture, sea level change, and during the period
where we were coming out of the last glacial, into the inter glacial that we're having
now, the warm period that we're in, we saw a seven to fifteen degree temperature
change that occurred in two to three years. And you try and relate that to what we're
seeing today and it's absolutely phenomenal. That kind of a change would be
catastrophic. That change occurred 11,500 years ago. That was a naturally occurring
change. There were no human forcings at that point whatsoever. And so, we really
need to understand how these things happened in the past, how quickly they
happened, why they happened, so we can try and predict what's going to happen. And
that's just what is going to happen with naturally occurring events, then you add the
greenhouse gasses on top of it and it's even much more difficult.
That's ice core researcher, Deb Meese. Our series on Global Climate Change is
supported by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt
Foundation. Thanks today to our series producer, Margaret Landsman.
|
|
