World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, NCDC Paleoclimatology Branch

The Beginning

Images showing different climates and vegetation

Imagine that over the course of a decade or two, the long, snowy winters of northern New England were replaced by the milder winters of a place like Washington, D.C. Or that a sharp decrease in rainfall turned the short-grass prairie of the western Great Plains into a desert landscape like you would see in Arizona. Changes of this sort would obviously have important impacts on humans, affecting the crops we grow, the availability of water, and our energy usage.

These scenarios are not science fiction. Paleoclimate records indicate that climate changes of this size and speed have occurred at many times in the past. Past human civilizations were sometimes successful in adapting to the climate changes and at other times they were not.

Because they occur relatively rapidly, these sorts of climate change are called abrupt climate change. Our understanding of past abrupt climate changes and their causes is still in its infancy; most of the research on this topic has been completed since the early 1990s. Scientists have made significant progress, however, in identifying and describing various abrupt events of the past and forming hypotheses about their causes. This paleo perspective will describe the evidence for past abrupt climate change and explore some of the possible causes.

The Story
This section defines abrupt climate change, discusses climate feedbacks, and provides an introduction to paleoclimate proxies.

The Data
This section presents paleoclimate data for recent periods of abrupt climate change, as well as changes occurring during past Ice Ages.

About NOAA's Paleoclimatology Program:

NOAA's Paleoclimatology provides the paleoclimate data and information needed to understand and model interannual to centennial scale environmental change. This site was created to introduce the topic and issues surrounding abrupt climate change, and to show how paleoclimate data can be used to understand the processes leading to abrupt climate change. Links to scientific research results and data sets are provided throughout the perspective.

Original online publication 19 May 2004. Updated June 2008.
"A Paleo Perspective on Abrupt Climate Change"
Created by staff of the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program.
Click here for acknowledgments and here for site map


http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/index.html Downloaded Tuesday, 16-Sep-2008 07:36:51 EDT Last Updated Monday, 07-Jul-2008 11:35:28 EDT by paleo@noaa.gov Please see the Paleoclimatology Contact Page or the NCDC Contact Page if you have questions or comments.