EESC BC 1001x Chapter 12: Unit 12: Earth’s Changing Climate
20 Oct 2016
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12. 3: climate change- what the past tells us. Define paleoclimate. (there is a glossary at the end of each chapter . scroll down in the chapter. ) Paleoclimate: referring to past climates of the earth. Scientists use radiocarbon dating to determine what types of plants lived in the sampled region at the time each layer was formed. Changes in vegetation reflect surface temperature changes. During glaciation events, huge volumes of water were trapped in continental ice sheets, lowering sea levels as much as 130 meters and exposing land between islands and across continents. One main cause is variations in earth"s orbit around the sun. These variations, which involve the tilt of the earth"s pole of rotation and the ellipticity of the earth"s orbit, have regular timescales of 23,000, 41,000, and 100,000 years and cause small changes in the distribution of solar radiation received on the earth.
