Reconstructing Earth's Climate History. Kristen St. John

Reconstructing Earth's Climate History - Kristen St. John


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of scientific inquiry, which aims to build your content knowledge and observational and analytical skills.

      In order to get the most out of your work with this book, we want you to know why and how we designed it, as well as what is new to the second edition. We think understanding the design will give you a roadmap of what to expect as you use this book to reconstruct Earth's climate history.

      There has never been a more critical time for students to understand how the Earth works. Understanding the causes and potential consequences of Earth's changing climate are of particular importance because modern climate change is an issue that impacts economies, societies, environments, and lifestyles; furthermore these impacts are distributed differently across countries and populations. The context for understanding global warming today lies in the records of Earth's past. This is demonstrated by decades of paleoclimate research by scientists in organizations such as the International Ocean Discovery Program, the Antarctic Geological Drilling Program, the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center's Ice Core Laboratory, and many others. The purpose of this book is to put key data and published case studies of past climate change at your fingertips, so that you can experience the nature of paleoclimate research and discovery. You will evaluate data, practice developing and testing hypotheses, and infer the broader implications of scientific results. It is our philosophy that addressing how we know is as important as addressing what we know about past climate.

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      The chapters in this book are organized to first explore fundamental aspects of paleoclimate research and the “tools” used to conduct this research. Chapter 1 introduces how marine and terrestrial records are obtained, with increased representation of terrestrial records compared to the first edition. Chapter 2 focuses on describing marine sediments, a major archive of past climate. Chapters 35 focus on how ages of geologic and paleoclimate records are determined using multiple methods. New to the second edition, Chapter 3 introduces relative and radiometric age dating techniques. We also reversed the order of two chapters from the first edition: paleomagnetism (now Chapter 4) and biostratigraphy (now Chapter 5) because magnetostratigraphy is a bridge between the numerical ages that radiometric dating provides and the relative ages that fossils provide. Chapter 5 was expanded to include a new unit on organic‐walled microfossils.


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