Tag Archives: Sea ice

Sea ice, ordinations and artefacts

Posted on 21/01/2015 by richard telford

Sea ice is an important climatic variable, affecting the Earth’s albedo and the transfer of heat and gas between the ocean and the atmosphere. Naturally palaeoclimatologists want to be able to reconstruct past variability in sea ice and several different … Continue reading →

Posted in Peer reviewed literature, transfer function | Tagged | 3 Comments

Did the Sun tickle the diatoms of Disko Bugt?

Posted on 11/10/2014 by richard telford

Diatoms, transfer functions and claims of palaeoecological evidence of solar variability: how could I resist discussing Sha et al. (2014)? Sha et al develop a diatom-sea ice transfer function and apply it to a diatom record from a core from … Continue reading →

Posted in climate, Peer reviewed literature, solar variability, transfer function | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Diatoms, sea-ice and temperature

Posted on 07/10/2014 by richard telford

Diatoms make good proxies for palaeoenvironmental reconstructions: their exquisite silica cell walls can be identified to species level (mostly); they preserve well in sediments (usually) and they are sensitive to multiple environmental variables. Being sensitive to multiple environmental variables is … Continue reading →

Posted in climate, Peer reviewed literature, transfer function | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A biased and incomplete summary of Sea Ice Proxy workshop

Posted on 27/06/2014 by richard telford

Sea-ice is an important component of the Earth’s climate system, for example, it greatly increases the proportion of sunlight reflected at high latitudes – the albedo of ice is ~0.6 whereas it is only 0.1 for open water. Because of … Continue reading →

Posted in climate, Novel proxies, transfer function | Tagged | 1 Comment

Small tornado in Bremerhaven

Posted on 24/06/2014 by richard telford

The last couple of days I’ve been discussing sea-ice reconstructions at the Pages Sea-Ice Proxy workshop in Bremerhaven. A huge range of proxies have been presented, ranging from traces of halogens in ice cores to transfer function based reconstructions. One … Continue reading →

Posted in climate, Novel proxies, transfer function | Tagged | Leave a comment

How good are dinocyst-inferred sea-ice reconstructions?

Posted on 12/08/2013 by richard telford

Dinocysts, the resting stage of dinoflagellates, have been used to reconstruct a range of palaeoceanographic variables, including summer and winter sea surface temperature (SST) and salinity, productivity and sea ice using transfer functions. I became interested in dinocysts as proxies … Continue reading →

Posted in climate, Peer reviewed literature, transfer function | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments