Newly Collected Sediment Cores Offer Unprecedented Insight into Arctic Climate Change
15.06.2009 - Land & Geology, Other, Arctic
A team of scientists from the United States, Germany, Russia and Austria have retrieved sediment cores that go further back into the Arctic's paleoclimate than anything achieved before. These cores were collected from three holes under Siberia's Lake El'gygytgyn (Lake E), which was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteor more than a half-mile in diameter hit the Earth and gouged an 11-mile wide crater.
This is the longest continuous sediment record of past climate in the terrestrial Arctic. and it will enable scientists to go back some 3.5 million years, or 30 times further back than with the cores retrieved from the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Scientists hope to gain new insight into why and how the Arctic climate system evolved from a warm forested ecosystem into a cold permafrost ecosystem between 2 million and 3 million years ago.
What's more cores drilled further down into bedrock beneath the sediment layers will offer geologists a rare opportunity to study impact melt rocks and target rocks from one of the best preserved large meteor impact craters on Earth, the only one formed in silicon-rich volcanic rock.
