DISAMPING KANAN INI.............
PLEASE USE ........ "TRANSLATE MACHINE" .. GOOGLE TRANSLATE BESIDE RIGHT THIS
.................
Kerang kuno menulis
ulang sejarah 10.000 tahun El Nino cycle
Tumpukan
kerang kuno memberikan catatan jangka panjang yang dapat diandalkan untuk perubahan
iklim untuk .......... Hasilnya
menunjukkan bahwa El nino 10.000 tahun
yang lalu adalah kuat dan sering seperti sekarang. Hasil studi mempertanyakan
seberapa baik model komputer dapat mereproduksi siklus sejarah El Niño , atau memprediksi bagaimana
mereka bisa mengubah iklim masa depan.....................
Ancient shellfish remains rewrite 10,000-year history of El Nino cycles
Date:
August 8,
2014
Source:
University of Washington
Summary:
Piles of ancient shells provide the first reliable
long-term record for the powerful driver of year-to-year climate changes.
Results show that the El Niños 10,000 years ago were as strong and frequent as
they are today. The study results question how well computer models can
reproduce historical El Niño cycles, or predict how they could change under
future climates.
.......................
The planet's largest and most powerful driver of climate
changes from one year to the next, the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the
tropical Pacific Ocean, was widely thought to have been weaker in ancient times
because of a different configuration of the Earth's orbit. But scientists
analyzing 25-foot piles of ancient shells have found that the El Niños 10,000
years ago were as strong and frequent as the ones we experience today.
The results,
from the University of Washington and University of Montpellier, question how
well computer models can reproduce historical El Niño cycles, or predict how
they could change under future climates. The paper is now online and will
appear in an upcoming issue of Science.
"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.
The ancient
shellfish feasts also upend a widely held interpretation of past climate.
"Our
data contradicts the hypothesis that El Niño activity was very reduced 10,000
years ago, and then slowly increased since then," said first author
Matthieu Carré, who did the research as a UW postdoctoral researcher and now
holds a faculty position at the University of Montpellier in France.
In 2007,
while at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and
Ocean, Carré accompanied archaeologists to seven sites in coastal Peru.
Together they sampled 25-foot-tall piles of shells from Mesodesma donacium
clams eaten and then discarded over centuries into piles that archaeologists
call middens.
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.
The shells
provide 1- to 3-year-long records of monthly temperature of the Pacific Ocean
along the coast of Peru. Combining layers of shells from each site gives water
temperatures for intervals spanning 100 to 1,000 years during the past 10,000
years.
The new
record shows that 10,000 years ago the El Niño cycles were strong,
contradicting the current leading interpretations. Roughly 7,000 years ago the
shells show a shift to the central Pacific of the most severe El Niño impacts,
followed by a lull in the strength and occurrence of El Niño from about 6,000
to 4,000 years ago.
One possible
explanation for the surprising finding of a strong El Niño 10,000 years ago was
that some other factor was compensating for the dampening effect expected from
cyclical changes in Earth's orbit around the sun during that period.
"The
best candidate is the polar ice sheet, which was melting very fast in this
period and may have increased El Niño activity by changing ocean
currents," Carré said.
Around 6,000
years ago most of the ice age floes would have finished melting, so the effect
of Earth's orbital geometry might have taken over then to cause the period of
weak El Niños.
In previous
studies, warm-water shells and evidence of flooding in Andean lakes had been
interpreted as signs of a much weaker El Niño around 10,000 years ago.
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.
"Climate
models and a variety of datasets had concluded that El Niños were essentially
nonexistent, did not occur, before 6,000 to 8,000 years ago," Sachs said.
"Our results very clearly show that this is not the case, and suggest that
current understanding of the El Niño system is incomplete."
Story
Source:
The above
story is based on materials provided by University of Washington. Note: Materials may be edited
for content and length.
Journal
Reference:
- M. Carre, J. P. Sachs, S. Purca, A. J. Schauer, P. Braconnot, R. A. Falcon, M. Julien, D. Lavallee. Holocene history of ENSO variance and asymmetry in the eastern tropical Pacific. Science, 2014; DOI: 10.1126/science.1252220
