Antarctica Climate

Summary

Climate video

A lot of what we know about climate change we know about because of research in Antarctica. Antarctica is the coldest place on earth with a temperature of 100 degrees below zero. The United States has been doing research there on microbes since the summer of 1976. What we have found is that life changes as climate changes. This can be proven through the climate records, which is what this video was mainly about.

There are many ways animals cope with the change in climate, birds fly south while others adapt by hibernation or foraging the elements. If adaptation did not take place then that animal or species did not survive.A good example of adapting and dependence on the weather was given when the video talked of the Rajasthan Desert. The people there only get water once a year and that during monsoon season.

The video went through many ways to check the climate record.

One way was by checking through lake settlement layers. In the lake settlement layers there was an assemblage of plant pollen, sand, charcoal and other things and just by the layers of pollen, it could be interpreted that there had been a long drought. Another way that the climate record can be checked is by the minerals composition of limestone in caves. It was found that minerals that formed when it was cold differed from minerals deposited when it was warm. The minerals create a chemistry and when extracted makes a climate record of the past. I thought how the man in the video took the water from the limestone to the lab and found the history of climate layer by layer was fascinating I also felt the same way when they checked the climate record by drilling an ice core in Antarctica and then took the center of that core, cut it into slivers and found a kaleidoscope of color and history with there equipment. There were not just one ice age but several and according to what the video showed about the correlation between the ice age and the earths change in orbit. A ice age begins when ice from the previous winter fails to be melted and so it keeps accumulating. This would be likely when the earths in an oblong orbit and farthest form the sun. The correlation between the climate changes and the earth's position to the sun is proposed by Milankovitch. Sea cores are another great way of finding the record which are better then