El Nino clues from the bottom of the ocean
Using sediment deposited in lakes on the mid- coast of NSW, a team of environmental geologists from the University of Technology, Sydney and University of Wollongong is on a quest to unearth scientific details about climatic conditions, including El Nino events, since the last ice age 18,000 years ago.
In research conducted at the Myall, Smiths and Tuggerah Lakes on the eastern Australian coast, Professor Skilbeck and his co-researchers have retrieved and dated muddy sediment that points within the past 45,000 years to 1500-year cycles shaped by global climatic forces known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events, which also controlled the advance and retreat of glaciers in the northern hemisphere.
”By establishing past climate records, we have a basis for comparison with today's climatic trends. There's a lot of hype about global warming but people can't speak definitively of its effects unless they know what's happened in the past. Current changes might just be natural fluctuations in the climate cycle and our task is to define those natural variabilities in climate from the geological record,” Skilbeck said.
