Ice Cores, Temperatures, And CO2
18 hours ago
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got to thinking about the ice cores. It’s pretty amazing to realize that the air trapped in the tiny bubbles in the ice is the very air that was trapped there way back when the ice formed. And that air can be hundreds of thousands of years old. Not only that, but we can analyze the trapped air to see the changes in CO2 over time.
How accurate are the results? Well, different ice cores drilled and analyzed by different groups of scientists give very similar results. Here are some recent ice core CO2 measurements, along with the Mauna Loa measurements in orange.
Figure 1. CO2 measurements from a variety of ice cores, along with Mauna Loa measurements in orange.
As you can see, there’s very good agreement between all of the various ice cores, ice core analysis groups, and ice core CO2 measurement methods. And the ice core measurements agree with the Mauna Loa CO2 observations quite well.
Another thing that can be calculated from the isotopes in the air trapped in the ice-core bubbles are the temperatures back in the day. The Vostok ice core data, one of the longest datasets, recorded four glaciated intervals and five “interglacials” including our current interglacial, the Holocene.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/05/ice-cores-temperatures-and-co2/
