University of Massachusetts Amherst The automated Lake El’gygytgyn research station, seen here with international flags, was set up in 2001 and recorded the regional weather continuously for eight years until it was removed during drilling operations in 2009.
New research from an international team confirms that the Arctic has gone through intensely warm periods, warmer than scientists thought was possible, during the last 2.8 million years. The extreme interglacial warm periods correspond to times when parts of Antarctica were ice free and warm, indicating a strong climate connection between the northern and southern hemispheres. The findings, which stem from examination of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the Arctic, show that the polar regions are much more vulnerable to change than previously thought, said the three lead scientists on the project, Martin Melles of the University of Cologne in Germany, Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst , and Pavel Minyuk of Russia's North-East Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute in Magadan. Patricia Anderson, a University of Washington professor emeritus of Earth and space sciences, was one of 17 authors of a paper documenting -
- The core was collected in 2009 from under ice-covered Lake El'gygytgyn in the northeast Russian Arctic. "Lake E," as it is known, formed 3.6 million years ago after a meteorite gouged an 11-mile-wide crater, and it has collected layers of sediment since then. The cores stretch nearly 30 times farther back in time than ice cores from Greenland that cover the last 110,000 years. The scientists suspect that the trigger for intense interglacials might actually be in Antarctica.
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