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Climatology, the study of how the Earth's climate system works, operates under a distinct handicap in comparison to other phenomenological sciences. Other fields of study permit the formation of hypotheses and subsequent testing of these hypotheses by direct experimentation in the laboratory. This is not feasible in climatology, for we live in the only laboratory possible. It is called the Earth.
Because we would be ill-advised to experiment on our only laboratory, we are left to construct computer models of how we believe the climate system of our planet works. If we understand the climate system correctly and have constructed our model appropriately, then the behavior of our model climate system should mimic the behavior of the Earth's climate system. One of the best ways to test our model is to see if it can reproduce the changes in climate which have happened throughout the long history of the Earth. Thus, acquiring detailed climate records extending back many hundreds of thousands of years has become a research priority in the study of global change.
The study of ice cores is an indispensible part of this process. Over the past decade, research on the climate record frozen in ice cores from the polar regions has changed our basic understanding of how the climate system works. Changes in temperature and precipitation which previously we believed would require many thousands of years to happen were revealed, through the study of ice cores, to have happened in fewer than twenty years. These discoveries have challenged our beliefs about how the climate system works. We have been required to search for new, faster mechanisms for climate change and we have begun to consider the interaction between industrial man and climate in light of these newly revealed mechanisms.
| Additional Information on the Contributions of Ice Core Research to Global Change Studies |
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