Recent high temperatures on the ice sheet in central and northern Greenland lies are unique, when compared to 1000 years of reconstructed climate conditions on the ice sheet.
Recent high temperatures on the ice sheet in central and northern Greenland lies are unique, when compared to 1000 years of reconstructed climate conditions on the ice sheet. This is the main message of a new scientific study based on numerous updated ice core data.
The Climate of the Last 1000 Years Reconstructed
In the last decade ice core researchers from the Alfred Wegner Institute and the Niels Bohr Institute have collaborated to update existing ice cores with information from the most recent decades. Hence, several missions have been flown to remote locations on the Greenland ice sheet in order to drill new cores at locations where ice cores had been drilled some 30 years ago.
This has been done in order to get ice and snow samples from the latest decades.
Comparing the water isotopic composition in the recent samples with similar records reaching a millennium back in time it is possible to reconstruct climate from year 1000 all the way up to 2011.
Read more at University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science
Image: Associate professor Bo Vinther preparing an ice core for analysis (Credit: Christian Morel)
