However, instead of digging into the soil, they look for clues about our planet's climate history by studying coral reefs, digging into ocean and
lake floor sediment and drilling deeply into glaciers and ice sheets.
Not exact matches
Scientists» understanding of the climate during the Pliocene has largely been pieced together from fossil records preserved in
sediments deposited beneath
lakes and on the ocean
floor.
About two dozen or so fossils of the creature have been recovered, all of them from 240 - million - year - old rocks deposited as
sediment on the
floor of a shallow, 5 - kilometer - long
lake in what is now southern Germany.
Fumio Inagaki from the Japan Agency for Marine - Earth Science and Technology, who made the discovery, says the
lake probably formed when carbon dioxide seeped out through the ocean
floor from a deep - sea volcano and pooled under a blanket of solid, icelike CO2 hydrate and deep - sea
sediment.
Ancient
sediments that once resided on a
lake bed and the ocean
floor show sulfur isotope ratios unlike those found in other samples from the same time, calling into question accepted ideas about when the Earth's atmosphere began to contain oxygen, according to researchers from the U.S., Canada and Japan.
They live only in a few borderline places, however; for global temperatures scientists use not only other species of trees but a wide variety of «proxies» from ice cores, coral reefs, cave deposits, the sea
floor, pollen in
lake sediments, boreholes in rock and so forth.
In recent years there have been many studies collecting data from ice cores in Greenland,
sediments drilled from the ocean
floor and from continental
lakes, and so forth.