Topic: Climate Change
Mining the oceans for historical temperature records: what corals can tell us
New Horizons in Science 2008
Monday, 27 October Morning sessions A
Speaker: Robert B. Dunbar, Ph.D.
Robert B. Dunbar roams the world in search of sediments and coral skeletons that can help him track climate change over the past 50 to 12,000 years. These samples are crucial to understanding climate change, he says, because most of the planet's heat is stored in the oceans. Data collected from such projects as submersible dives in the Gulf of Alaska and an Antarctic drilling project suggest how much the Earth is being altered by increasing carbon dioxide independent of the effects of warming.