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Timing is everything in a game of two hemispheres

Nature volume 394, pages 717–718 (1998)Cite this article

What causes ice ages, and other episodes of violent climate change? One clue comes from a new study of ice cores, which, unexpectedly, seems to show rapid warming events happening first in the Southern Hemisphere.

Leads and lags are at the heart of the palaeoclimate approach to understanding how the climate works. If event 1 leads event 2 in a palaeoclimatic record, for example, then event 1 could have caused event 2, but not vice versa. From this simple logic cause and effect is inferred, processes are proposed, models are tested, and our understanding of the climate system advances. But to establish leads and lags, dating of the records must be precise. For climate records extending back into glacial times, the state of the art has been to cross-date records to within about a thousand years. Yet many of the most dramatic climate-change events occur over much shorter timescales1.

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Figure 1: A comparison of the isotope records from the GRIP (Greenland) and Byrd (Antarctica) ice cores during the last ice age.

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  1. Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Campus Box 450, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    James W. C. White & Eric J. Steig

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  1. James W. C. White
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  2. Eric J. Steig
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White, J., Steig, E. Timing is everything in a game of two hemispheres. Nature 394, 717–718 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29386

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