Big weather events in 2006 series#

Furthermore, the cooling occurred much more gradually, giving these events a saw-tooth shape in climate records from most of the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 1). One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15☌ (Huber et al. There are twenty-five of these distinct warming-cooling oscillations (Dansgaard 1984) which are now commonly referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, or D-O cycles. Each successively deeper ice layer represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history from the past, and together, the oxygen isotope record told a story of abrupt, millennial-scale climate shifts in air temperatures over Greenland between extremely cold stadial conditions and relatively mild interstadial periods during the last ice age (Figure 1) (Alley 2000, Alley et al. These climate fluctuations were first discovered when scientists reconstructed past temperature variability over Greenland by analyzing tiny changes in the relative abundance of the oxygen-16 isotope versus the oxygen-18 isotope (noted as δ 18O and reported in parts per thousand) in ice cores recovered from Greenland glaciers.

Big weather events in 2006 series#

Unlike the relatively stable climate Earth has experienced over the last 10,000 years, Earth's climate system underwent a series of abrupt oscillations and reorganizations during the last ice age between 18,000 and 80,000 years ago (Dansgaard 1984, Bond et al.