Sediment yields climate record for past half-mil...( COLUMBUS Ohio Researchers here have...)

COLUMBUS, Ohio Researchers here have used sediment from the deep ocean bottom to reconstruct a record of ancient climate that dates back more than the last half-million years.

The record, trapped within the top 20 meters (65.6 feet) of a 400-meter (1,312-foot) sediment core drilled in 2005 in the North Atlantic Ocean by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, gives new information about the four glacial cycles that occurred during that period.

The new research was presented today at the Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center. The meeting is jointly sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Foundation.

Harunur Rashid, a post-doctoral fellow at the Byrd Center, explained that experts have been trying to capture a longer climate record for this part of the ocean for nearly a half-century. "We've now generated a climate record from this core that has a very high temporal resolution, one that is decipherable at increments of 100 to 300 years," he said.

While climate records from ice cores can show resolutions with individual annual layers, ocean sediment cores are greatly compressed with resolutions sometimes no finer than millennia

"What we have is unprecedented among marine records."

Dating methods such as carbon-14 are useless beyond 30,000 years or so, he said, so Rashid and his colleagues used the ratio of the isotopes oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 as a proxy for temperature in the records. The isotopes were stored in the remains of tiny sea creatures that fell to the ocean bottom over time.

When the researchers compared their record of past climate from the North Atlantic to a similar record taken from an ice core drilled from Dome C in Antarctica, they found it was remarkably similar.

"You can't miss the similarity between the two records, one from the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean and the other from Antar
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