Study of Antarctic ice cores reveals atmospheric CO2 history over past thousand years
(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with affiliations to institutions in the U.S., Switzerland and Korea has found links between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the land carbon reservoir and climate over the past thousand years, by examining ice cores taken from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide. In their paper published in Nature Geoscience, the team describes the levels of CO2 they found and why they believe that most of the level changes they observed were likely due to terrestrial sources. Jed Kaplan, with the University of Lausanne offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue, comparing CO2 level changes found by the researchers with historical human events putting the ice core data into perspective.