Lecture 8 Glacial-interglacial variability: phenomenology and dynamical background

8.1 A brief description of the phenomenology Information about climate history over the past two million years or so is obtained from two main sources [4]. The £rst is sediment cored from the ocean’s bottom, where the isotopic compositions of buried plankton skeletons and other buried material are used as proxy indicators to past climate, and are related empirically to past ice land volume, paleo temperature, etc (Fig. 3). The second source is ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland, that contain again various isotopic records as well as trapped gas bubbles and atmospheric dust from the past 400,000 years or so (Fig. 37).