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Climatic Mud
Tue Nov 01, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton with The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on Global Climate Change.
Dr. Julie Friddell is a Research Geophysicist working at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, NH. She was lead author on a recent paper, which studied climate fluctuations.
We were studying marine sediments, which are - it's basically the mud at the bottom of the ocean - for the last 11,000 years, and we got this mud from the Santa Barbara Basin. And this basin is very special because it has very high sedimentation rate and it has layered sediment, so you can look at the sediment record in very high resolution. And what we were investigating was oxygen isotopic ratios of planktonic forminifera. Now, what that means is we were looking at the chemical composition of tiny, uh, sand-sized creatures that live in the surface ocean, and when you analyze them chemically, you can tell what temperature water they grew in.
During the middle part of this Holocene period, around 5,000 years ago, the sea surface temperatures in this basin were warmer and more fluctuating - they were more variable than they were at any other time during the Holocene. So, what we have found from other climate records, and from our record also was that was the time of the Holocene that was the warmest. So when you have the warmest sea surface temperatures you also have the most fluctuating sea surface temperatures.
So, will our presently warming climate cause more variable weather? Friddell says it's still too early in the research to connect what's happening today to climate variations from 5,000 years ago.
The Weather Notebook is produced through grants from Subaru of America, and Environmental Defense, which supports out Climate Change Series. We are a program of the Mount Washington Observatory.
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