In this study,
we used oxygen isotope ratios, which is a commonly used palaeothermometer.
Not exact matches
«
Oxygen in the water that mammals drink is preserved in the phosphate in their teeth, so these can be
used to calculate
isotope ratios.
The team
used records of
oxygen isotope ratios (which provide a record of ancient water temperature) from microscopic plankton fossils recovered from the Mediterranean Sea, spanning the last 5.3 million years.
«Scientists
use the
ratio of the various sulfur
isotopes as their strongest evidence for atmospheric
oxygen.»
They limited data sources to locations around the world in which paleoceanographic data also exist,
using seven variables: salinity; potential temperature;
oxygen isotope ratios in water; carbon
isotope ratios in dissolved inorganic carbon; and concentrations of phosphate, nitrate, and dissolved
oxygen.
That seems a way more satisfactory approach than the crude estimate in Hansen et al (2013) that I've been
using, which relies on an interpretive leap from a deep water temperature proxy (
oxygen isotope ratios from the microscopic shells of bottom - dwelling marine critters).
Like the data
used right through 0.02 to 66 My, the Freidrich et al collection comprises stable
oxygen isotope ratios from the shells of tiny bottom - dwelling, deep - water marine organisms (benthic foraminifera).
The analysis below
used the
ratio of
oxygen isotopes in the stalagmites to estimate the water temperature at the time they were formed.
Stable
oxygen isotope ratios contained in the shell can be
used to infer past water temperatures.
The principal dataset we
use is the temporal variation of the
oxygen isotope ratio (δ18O relative to δ16O; figure 1a right - hand scale) in the shells of deep - ocean - dwelling microscopic shelled animals (foraminifera) in a near - global compilation of ocean sediment cores [4].