In a non-Greenland Arctic study, Jiang et al. (2002) analyzed diatom assemblages from a high-resolution core extracted from the seabed of the north Icelandic shelf, which led to their reconstruction of a 4600-year history of summer sea surface temperature at that location. Starting from a maximum value of about 8.1°C at 4400 years BP, the climate was found to have cooled fitfully for about 1700 years and then more consistently over the final 2700 years of the record. The most dramatic departure from this long-term decline was centered on about 850 years BP, during the Medieval Warm Period, when the temperature rose by more than 1°C above the line describing the long-term downward trend to effect an almost complete recovery from the colder temperatures of the Dark Ages Cold Period, after which temperatures continued their descent into the Little Ice Age, ending with a final most recent value of approximately 6.3°C. Hence, their data clearly showed that the Medieval Warm Period in this part of the Arctic was significantly warmer than it is there now.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 23:06:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015