Paleoclimatolgy

You may have heard of paleontology, or even climatology. But what is paleoclimatology? In brief, it is the study of the history of Earth’s climate. You may have learned about paleoclimatology without even knowing it - if you’ve ever watched one of the Ice Age movies, you were exposed to what Earth’s climate might have looked like 20,000 years ago.

Of course, the Ice Age franchise is a series of animated children’s movies that only scratches the surface of what paleoclimatology can do. If you’re wondering just how much we know, take a look at the geologic timescale. Based on the rock record, the geologic time scale breaks down Earth’s history into different eons, eras, periods, and epochs, and changes in climate are often defined using these markers as start and end points (for a more in depth explanation of climate change, both long and short term, check out this post).

Paleoclimatology looks at climates so old that there is no instrumental data available, and often no human records of climate either. So how do scientists in this discipline figure out what happened? Paleoclimatology relies heavily on proxy methods, i.e. different items that may reveal something about the climate in a certain time. Some proxy methods include tree rings (temperature and moisture), ice (temperature via isotope ratios), foraminifera (water temperature and chemistry), and sediment cores (vegetation change). You can learn more about each of these methods here.

Hopefully you now have a basic understanding of paleoclimatology. But, you may be wondering why people study it (besides the fact that it’s pretty cool). For one, paleoclimatology is important in understanding why current climate change is abnormal. It also gives us a window into what could happen depending on how our climate changes in the future. And finally, it gives us a lot of really interesting information about Earth’s past (perhaps paving the way for more accurate Ice Age movies)!