A new study has successfully reconstructed temperature from the deep sea to reveal how global ice volume has varied over the glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 1.5 million years.

Scientists have announced a major breakthrough in understanding Earth’s climate machine by reconstructing highly accurate records of changes in ice volume and deep-ocean temperatures over the last 1.5 million years.

The study, which is reported in the journal Science, offers new insights into a decades-long debate about how the shifts in Earth’s orbit relative to the sun have taken Earth into and out of an ice-age climate.

Being able to reconstruct ancient climate change is a critical part of understanding why the climate behaves the way it does.  It also helps us to predict how the planet might respond to human-made changes, such as the injection of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, in the future.

Read more… (ScienceDaily)