In an analysis of the last 1.2 million years, Lorraine Lisiecki, geologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara has discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of Earth’s orbital cycle to changes in Earth’s climate.

Lisiecki conducted climate analysis by examining ocean sediment cores. These cores were collected in 57 different places of the world. Analyzing sediment, scientists can reconstruct the climate of the past million years. Lisiecki’s contribution is the climate record connection with the planet’s orbital cycle.

It is known that the Earth’s orbit around the Sun changes the shape at every 100,000 years. The orbit becomes more circular or more elliptical, i.e., its eccentricity varies. A related issue is the 41,000-year cycle that describes the tilt of Earth’s axis. (more…)

To have a clear idea of what can happen when the carbon cycle is altered on Earth, which is both cause and consequence of climate change, scientists can study a phenomenon occurred for about 720 million years.

The new data provided by a team of geologists directed from Princeton University suggest that a superglaciacion known as “Snowball Earth”, which may have covered the continents and oceans with a thick layer of ice, a drastic change in the carbon cycle. This change could, in turn, have led to ice ages that followed. (more…)

13,000 years ago, Earth was hit by thousands of cometary fragments for an hour, causing a catastrophe of the kind suffered by the area of Tunguska in 1908, but to a much larger scale, which included a notable cooling of the planet. This is the conclusion they reached in a new study.

The cooling of 8 degrees Celsius interrupted the warming that was taking place at the end of the last ice age and caused it to resume the advance of glaciers.

Several lines of evidence have been found that this abrupt climate change was associated with any extraterrestrial event extraordinary. The border between the before and after the event is marked between the geological layers as a black layer a few inches thick, present in many places throughout the United States. (more…)

A fossil shells of land snail found in ancient soils of the Canary Islands show that the Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa has become increasingly dry during the past 50,000 years.
Land snail shells are abundant, and sensitive to environmental changes, such as fossils, are well preserved. Measurements of changes in the ratios of oxygen isotopes in fossil shells can provide information on changes in ancient climate.

The isotopic analysis performed on fossil shells of land snail from the Canary Islands show oxygen isotope ratios suggest that the relative humidity was higher in the islands 50,000 years ago. This is the interpretation of the results have made the study’s authors, Yurena Yanes and Crayton J. Yapp, both the Department of Earth Sciences at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. (more…)