Scientific Ocean Drilling and Earth's Climate History: Past is Prologue
Abstract
Over the last 50 years, the ocean drilling programs have provided a gold mine of data about Earth's climate history, critical information that informs ongoing efforts to predict, mitigate, and adapt to anthropogenic global warming. In this talk I will review major advances in our understanding Earth's climate history including the behavior and physics of polar ice sheets, Earth's sea level history, the response of ocean circulation and productivity to climate change, the role of atmospheric CO2 in controlling Earth's temperature as well as the tectonic and orbital processes that also control climate on geologic timescales. The first drilling expeditions opened up a vast encyclopedia of Earth's past climate history—we are still reading that book today as our research vessels continue to explore new frontiers off Antarctica, in the Arctic, and around the world.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.U12A..05R
- Keywords:
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- 1705 Biogeosciences;
- HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICSDE: 1744 Tectonophysics;
- HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICSDE: 3036 Ocean drilling;
- MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICSDE: 4999 General or miscellaneous;
- PALEOCEANOGRAPHY