By measuring rare oxygen isotopes, a team of geochemists has developed a way to deduce long-ago global temperatures 10 kilometers up in the atmosphere, creating a paleo–weather balloon.
Reconstructing ancient climates is murky business. Cores of sediment or ice contain records of temperatures that date back hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, but typically only near Earth’s surface or in the ocean. Now, by measuring rare oxygen isotopes, a team of geochemists has developed a way to deduce long-ago global temperatures 10 kilometers up in the atmosphere, creating, in effect, a paleo–weather balloon.
To create the new probe, Laurence Yeung, a geochemist at Rice University, and his colleagues relied on The challenge was measuring small variations of an exceedingly rare gas, which Yeung says was akin to weighing a Boeing 737 jet to within the weight of a grain of sand. To achieve such precision, Rice graduate student and co-author Asmita Banerjee worked in a freezer room, cutting 100-gram chunks of ice taken from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica that dated to the LGM. She carefully melted the ice and collected the gasses in the air bubbles.
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