73 articles
Ice core
An ice core is a cylindrical sample of ice drilled from a glacier or ice sheet, preserving trapped ancient air that records 800,000 years of climate history.
Ice core chronology
Ice core chronology is the dating framework assigning an age to every depth in a drilled ice core, built by layer counting, ice-flow models, and stratigraphy.
Ice-rafted debris
Ice-rafted debris (IRD), also called ice-rafted detritus, is sediment carried by floating ice and released to the seafloor when it melts, used as a paleoclimate proxy for past iceberg discharge.
Isotope thermometry
Isotope thermometry is a paleoclimate method that estimates past temperatures from temperature-dependent isotope ratios, chiefly oxygen, measured in marine carbonates, speleothems, vein calcites, and polar ice.
Lake Suguta
Lake Suguta was a large Pleistocene and Holocene lake filling the Suguta Valley in the northern Kenya Rift, reaching about 300 m deep during the African Humid Period.
Last Glacial Maximum
The Last Glacial Maximum was the most recent interval when global ice sheets peaked, about 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, dropping sea level by roughly 130 meters.
Last Glacial Period
The Last Glacial Period, known as the Last Ice Age or Devensian, spanned about 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, when ice sheets grew over North America and northern Eurasia.
Last Interglacial
The Last Interglacial, known in Europe as the Eemian, was the warm period from about 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, when sea level stood several meters higher than today.
Late Paleozoic icehouse
The Late Paleozoic icehouse, also called the Karoo Ice Age, was Earth's longest Phanerozoic ice age, lasting from about 370 to 260 million years ago.
Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age, also called the mini ice age, was a period of cooler climate from about 1300 to 1850, when glaciers advanced and the coldest decades came in the 17th century.
Marine isotope stage
A marine isotope stage (MIS) is a numbered interval of Quaternary time defined by oxygen isotope ratios in deep-sea cores, marking alternating warm and cold periods.
Marine Isotope Stage 3
Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3) is an intermediate climatic stage of the last glacial period, roughly 57,000 to 29,000 years ago, known for abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger warmings.
Marinoan glaciation
The Marinoan glaciation was the younger of the two Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations, a global ice age ending near 635 million years ago and followed by cap carbonates.
Medieval Warm Period
The Medieval Warm Period, also called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, was an interval of relative warmth in parts of the North Atlantic region from roughly 950 to 1250 CE.
Milankovitch cycles
Milankovitch cycles, or Milankovitch variations, are periodic changes in Earth's orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession that redistribute sunlight and pace ice ages, named for Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch.
Miocene Climatic Optimum
The Miocene Climatic Optimum was a middle Miocene warm interval from about 16.9 to 14.7 million years ago, with global temperatures 3 to 4 °C warmer than today.
Multiproxy analysis
Multiproxy analysis is a paleoclimate method that combines independent proxies, such as tree rings, pollen, and isotopes, to reconstruct past temperature as a single curve with quantified uncertainty.
National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility
The National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility, formerly the National Ice Core Laboratory, is a US repository in Lakewood, Colorado, storing over 22,000 meters of ice cores.
NEEM (ice core)
NEEM (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling) was a Danish-led ice-core drilling project in northwest Greenland that recovered a 2,540 m core from 2008 to 2012.
Neoglaciation
Neoglaciation is the late Holocene interval, beginning roughly 5,000 years ago, when alpine glaciers regrew after Middle Holocene shrinkage; Porter and Denton formalized the concept in 1967.
Oceanic Anoxic Event 2
Oceanic Anoxic Event 2 (OAE 2) was an interval of widespread ocean deoxygenation at the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary, about 94 million years ago, during extreme global warmth.
Older Dryas
The Older Dryas was a brief cold stadial about 14,000 years ago that interrupted the Bølling–Allerød warming at the end of the last ice age, named for Dryas octopetala leaves in Scandinavian lake clays.
Oldest Dryas
The Oldest Dryas was the oldest of the three cold Dryas stadials of the European late glacial, spanning roughly 19,000 to 14,700 years before present and preceding the Bølling warming.
Ordovician–Silurian glaciation
The Ordovician–Silurian glaciation, often called the Hirnantian glaciation, was a brief, severe ice age about 445 million years ago that helped drive a major mass extinction.
Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project
The Palaeoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) coordinates standardized simulations of past climates in many climate models, testing them against palaeoclimate reconstructions since the early 1990s.
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, was a geologically rapid global warming and carbon release event about 56 million years ago, at the Paleocene–Eocene boundary.
Paleoclimate proxy
A paleoclimate proxy is a measurable property of a natural archive, such as ice cores, tree rings, or corals, that stands in for climate measurements made before instruments existed.
Paleoclimatology
Paleoclimatology, the study of Earth's ancient climate history, reconstructs conditions before instrumental records by reading natural archives such as tree rings, corals, ice cores, and sediments.
Paleogeography of the India–Asia collision system
The paleogeography of the India–Asia collision system reconstructs the continents and oceans that preceded India's collision with Asia, which closed the Neo-Tethys Ocean and built the Himalayas.
Quaternary glaciation
Quaternary glaciation: the ongoing ice age of the last 2.58 million years, marked by 41-kyr then ~100-kyr glacial–interglacial cycles, Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the Mid-Pleistocene Transition at ~900 ka, and the current Holocene interglacial.