GEOL 150Lg Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Water Mass, Pleistocene, Volcanism
Document Summary
Focus on times where the earth went through a huge climate change. Isotopes: atoms of an element that contain different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. They have the same makeup but just a different mass. (stable and radioactive) Know how that ratio is referred to! Know the direction that o18 changes with temperature. Temp in the environment can be calculated if we know the delta 18 in the shell and in the ocean. It takes less energy to evaporate the lighter isotope (o16) Ice cores as indicators of environmental change. Ice can only take us back a couple million years. Leaf area can show us further back. Plants have bigger leafs when there is more rain. Last 20,000 years is where we have the most information. High latitude temperature warm first and then tropics and oceans respond. The deep ocean warms at the same time as high latitude.
