How cold did Earth get during the last ice age? The truth may lie deep beneath lakes and could help predict how the planet will warm again.
How cold did Earth get during the last ice age? The truth may lie deep beneath lakes and could help predict how the planet will warm again.
Sediments in lake beds hold chemical records of ages past, among them the concurrent state of the atmosphere above. Scientists led by a Rice University professor and her colleagues have devised a new computational model to interpret what they reveal.
Sylvia Dee, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, and her colleagues have created a computational Lake Proxy System Model to translate data from deep beneath lake surface waters in a way that relates more directly to measurable climate model variables.
Their work is part of a public software platform created by Dee called PRYSM, and is described in the American Geophysical Union journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.
Read more at Rice University
Image: Rice University climate scientist Sylvia Dee created PRYSM, a computational modeling system, to improve climate models that use paleoclimate proxies from lake beds or other sources. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
