Dr. Stephen Barker publishes findings on climate change
22 Dec 2011
Dr. Stephen Barker and his colleagues have just published exciting findings demonstrating that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth's climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer-term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.
The work, recently published in Science (Sept. 2011), features an 800 kyr synthetic record of Greenland climate variability based on the thermal bipolar seesaw model that reproduces much of the variability seen in the Greenland ice cores over the last 100 kyr. The synthetic record provides both a stratigraphic reference and a conceptual basis for assessing the long-term evolution of millennial-scale variability, and its potential role in longer timescale climate change. Importantly, they provide evidence for a ubiquitous association between bipolar seesaw oscillations and glacial terminations throughout the Middle to Late Pleistocene.