January 24, 2025

How These Sea Shells Know the Weather in Greenland

3 minutes

To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:

Foraminifera: a class of single-celled marine organisms – protists, not animals – that live either near the surface ("planktonic foraminifera") or on the seafloor ("benthic foraminifera"). Called forams for short.

Climate proxy: something that tells us what the climate was like in the past, such as data from the thickness of tree rings, the composition of gases trapped in ancient ice, historical human records of annual bloom times (eg the long-recorded bloom dates of cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan), or the ratios of certain stable isotopes found in shells, corals, or other biogenic substances

Oxygen-18: a stable isotope of oxygen that contains 8 protons and 10 neutrons, rather than the 8 protons and 8 neutrons of "regular" oxygen (oxygen-16). The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seawater (and sea shells) can be used as a proxy for the global average temperature

Ice sheet: a permanent layer of ice covering land, as found in polar regions (and as distinguished from sea ice, like the stuff that floats at the north pole in the Arctic ocean). Combined, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain more than 99% of the total freshwater ice on Earth.

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