While many scientists don down vests and brave the ice fields of Greenland or Antarctica to pull up ice cores in search of climate data from the not-so-distant past, some don T-shirts and shorts to brave tropical heat. Per an article in the journal Nature, scientists are examining a core of mud pulled from the ground in Peru that is helping them examine 700,000 years of climate history.
A team led by D. T. Rodbell (Union College, New York) is peering into hundreds of thousands of years of deposits left by tropical Andean glaciation to better parse glacial-interglacial intervals of the recent Pleistocene Epoch. In particular, they are examining sediments from a “piston core” derived from Lake Junin in the upper Amazon basin. Their results match a 100,000-year periodicity shown by ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica with variations matched to regional monsoons because of overall climate changes.