What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind

A freshly extracted section of the
two-mile-deep West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Divide core, drilled from 2006 to 2011. 

A dramatic pattern in our planet’s climate history involves paroxysms in Arctic temperatures. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, Greenland repeatedly warmed by about 10 degrees Celsius over just a few decades and then gradually cooled. Meanwhile the Southern Hemisphere climate stayed fairly stable, with only weak and long-delayed echoes of the temperature chaos up north.

But new research shows the fierce winds circling Antarctica—an important lever on the global climate—shifted quickly in response to the Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes.

“It’s most surprising that we can see these really abrupt changes in the Northern Hemisphere making it very quickly to the Southern Hemisphere,” says first author Bradley Markle, a doctoral student in earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. “The atmospheric circulation is tightly connected across the globe during these events.”

Read the Futurity story - “What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind.”