Ice cores drilled at an elevation of 21,300 feet on Mt. Everest's East Rongbuk Glacier reveal that summer temperatures on the shoulder of the highest mountain on Earth have likely been warmer during the 20th century than during the previous 2,000 years. "Our reconstruction points to an unprecedented warming trend in the 20th Century," the researchers wrote in the Feb. 7, 2007 issue of the European journal "Climate of the Past."
In other news, fresh evidence has emerged that global warming may be causing Atlantic hurricanes to intensify. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the National Climatic Data Center say they aligned new and old satellite records dating back as far as 1983 to chart the trend in Atlantic hurricanes. "The data says that the Atlantic has been trending upwards in hurricane intensity quite a bit," says lead author James Kossin, a research scientist at UW-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite StudiesKossin. "But the trends appear to be inflated or spurious everywhere else, meaning that we still can't make any global statements."
-- Tom Yulsman
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Ice cores, cylinders of ice drilled out of glaciers and polar ice sheets, have played an important role in revealing what we know so far about the history of climate. Today, United States scientists are embarking on a new ice coring project in Greenland with a wide range of state of the art analyses in the hopes of resolving questions about how the climate system functions. Drilling for The Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two* (GISP2) began in 1989. When they reach the bottom of the ice sheet, 3000+ meters thick, in 1992 they will have recovered the longest, most detailed, continuous record of climate available from the northern hemisphere stretching back 200,000 years or more through two glacial/interglacial (cold/warm) cycles.
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