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Two Miles Under
Tue Aug 26, 2003
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.
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