One Oregon State University professor is trying to understand the climate going back thousands of years.
Cristo Buizert, an Associate Professor at OSU and a Paleoclimatologist, tells KATU News about a new study published on climate events that happened in Greenland.
“What we do, we go to these places, go to the interior, and we drill an ice core all the way from the top to the bottom, and this way we can add access to the snow layers that fell really long time ago,” says Buizert.
The ice cores, which are long cylinders of ice, contain layers of preserved ice and are used to help understand the climate long ago.
In the study, researchers are looking at specific climate events, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events.
They are known the be the most abrupt climate change events ever seen which were not caused by humans.
“The reason that we are so interested in these abrupt events is that there is a possibility that they could happen again in the future,”Buizert says.
The data collection will hopefully help climate models.
“Climate models are very good at predicting the response to CO2. The warming that we’ve seen over the last 40 years was already predicted by climate models back in the 80s. So this is a relatively straightforward thing to predict. When it comes to the exact stability of these ocean currents that is a much more difficult question. So one of the things we’re hoping to do is by providing all these really detailed observational records that we can start testing our models,” Buizert added.