
Ancient shellfish remains rewrite 10,000-year history of El Niño cycles - happyscrappy
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/08/08/ancient-shellfish-remains-rewrite-10000-year-history-of-el-nino-cycles/
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ChuckMcM
My favorite quote:

    
    
       > “We thought we understood what influences the El Niño 
       > mode of climate variation, and we’ve been able to show 
       > that we actually don’t understand it very well,” said 
       > Julian Sachs, a UW professor of oceanography.
    

One of the interesting thing about the press on climate change it means more
dollars to investigate. When the AIDS epidemic started it quintupled the
amount of money being invested in cell biology research, which has lead to
lots of interesting discoveries about how cells work, how viruses work, etc.

All the investment in the components of climate is going to open up a lot of
interesting avenues of both research and action. And hopefully inform when
action is either unwarranted or would be ineffective.

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vanderZwan
> The new data is more reliable, Carré said, for three reasons: the Peruvian
> coast is strongly affected by El Niño; _the shells record ocean temperature_
> , which is the most important parameter for the El Niño cycles; and the
> ability to record seasonal changes, the timescale at which El Niño can be
> observed.

Emphasis mine. I'm kind of curious how the shells encode that temperature
information. Growth speed? Chemical changes?

~~~
qbrass
FTA: "While in graduate school, Carré had developed a technique to analyze
shell layers to get ocean temperatures, using carbon dating of charcoal from
fires to get the year, and the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the growth layers
to get the water temperatures as the shell was forming."

~~~
contingencies
So it's his own pet technique. How well supported is it by the rest of the
scientific community?

