The Earth’s climate has changed dramatically over the eons, as the atmosphere continuously interacts with oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere over a wide range of timescales. Efforts to place recent climate observations into a longer-term context have been stimulated by concern over whether the twentieth century global warming trend is part of natural climate variability or linked to increasing anthropogenic inputs of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The ability to decipher past climates has expanded in recent years with an improved understanding of present climatic processes and the development of more sophisticated analytical tools. Instrumental records go back only a century or two. To extend the record beyond the instrumental period, scientists turn to “proxies” or “indicators” that are indirect measures of past climates or environments preserved in natural archives, such as marine and terrestrial sediments, trees, and ice cores, among others. Paleoclimatic or...
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Gornitz, V. (2009). Paleoclimate Proxies, An Introduction. In: Gornitz, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4411-3_171
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