Scientists from various disciplines who traveled to the Arctic say they've found clues for new insights into climate change in the past. They came back with sediment portions suggesting that Arctic temperatures have been as high as 25 degrees Celsius.
The expedition to the South Pole consisted of 18 scientists and nine graduate students from the UK, the US, Norway and the Netherlands.
They traveled to Spitsbergen, the largest island in what's known as the Svalbard Archipelago. Spitsbergen's sediments hide unique uninterrupted earth records dating back up to perhaps 65 million years ago.
The scientists sampled Spitsbergen's sediment which they say dates back to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This time interval is 'of crucial importance', they say. Greenhouse conditions suddenly gave way to icehouse conditions some 55 million years ago and the PETM was probably the warmest episode of the last 65 million years. Some researchers say Arctic temperatures might have reached 25ºC during the PETM.
The expedition's members reckon that Svalbard will have been much at the same latitude 55 million years ago as it is today. "Although this is still somewhat controversial, there is little doubt that latitudinal temperature gradients were very much reduced", they write in a
report.
UK members of the expedition extracted forms of 'tropical' plankton. They are known to have migrated towards the polar region as PETM temperatures increased, they say. The expedition also discovered leaf fossils typical of modern sub-tropical climates, providing further corroboration that the high Arctic had a much warmer climate at this time.
David Pilsbury, Chief Executive of WUN, displayed particular territorial sentiments reflecting on the trip. He said that even though a whole 'alphabet soup' of organisations is seeking to set agendas for research into climate change, little real funding goes into Arctic research. He called for transcendence of the disciplines to achieve less limited knowledge about Earth.
Dr Ian Harding, of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science said understanding the palaeoenvironments of past greenhouse episodes is crucial to inform investigations of the potential effects of ongoing climate change.
The expedition was organized by the Worldwide Universities Network-sponsored Palaeo-Arctic Climates and Environments (pACE) group. It marked the first step in developing an international programme of research.
Scientists Find Tropical Leaves On Expedition To The Arctic
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