This homework assignment is about paleoclimatology
https://serc.carleton.edu/mic
This homework assignment is about paleoclimatology
https://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/proxi…
a type of historical Earth science closely related to our course. The goal is to expose you to one of the types of climate research that geoscientists do and get basic experience in Excel creating data visualizations on your own.
The type of record you will be studying comes from long cores drilled from glaciers. Each year, a new layer of snow falls on the glacier, eventually freezing into an ice layer that traps atmospheric gases in bubbles. Geologists use a drill rig to a core of ice that can be thousands of feet long and contain hundreds of thousands of annual layers of ice. With a syringe, they sample the atmosphere bubbles from each layer and analyze the concentrations of carbon dioxide gas (CO2) to get information about past climate.
Your task is to explore a dataset available from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA provides scientific data and tools for forecasting weather, monitoring ocean and atmospheric conditions, and studying marine fisheries, and visualizing deep time climate records. Your assignment will be to:
Get the citation. Go to https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/stud…
Scroll to down to the bottom until you find a reference to the source of the original data. It’s listed as “additional references.” It is NOT the first citation shown on that page. Copy the title of this article citation (select the entire citation, ctrl-C).
Get the article. Go to GoogleScholar. https://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en-US.
and paste (ctrl-V) title of this article. Open the link to the article. Take a screenshot of the first page of the article and paste (ctrl-V) that screenshot into the same word document. This is the original study. Read it.
Summarize the article. In the same word document below your screenshot, write a short summary of the article that describes (1) the type of data the authors used, (2) where the samples were collected, (3) how far back in time the record goes, and (4) what their findings were. Number these answers. For the findings, describe (4a) how many glacial-interglacial (cold-warm) spells the Earth has experienced in the last 800 thousand years, which you can deduce from the carbon dioxide record, and (4b) how do modern carbon dioxide concentrations compare to those of past warm spells? This writeup should be less than a page at most. You may want to wait until after you have made your graph to finish the summary. If you have difficulty understanding the article, this link can provide more background
https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ic…
Get the data and make a graph. From the original NOAA link, download the “Excel Data File.” There are three worksheet pages in the Excel file. Go to the third one listed CO2 composite. Select the first two data columns “Gasage (yr BP)” and “CO2 (ppmv),” including the titles and data cells (don’t forget the titles in each column), all the way down to row 1916. While these cells are selected, go to Excel’s Insert tab at the top, and select chart type “Scatter with straight lines.” A graph of the data should appear.
Make the graph better. Now format the graph. The x-axis (horizontal axis of the graph) is age in years before present. The y-axis (vertical axis) is the concentration of carbon dioxide gas (a greenhouse, planet-warming gas) in the atmosphere in different years. Select the y-axis by clicking on on of the y-axis numbers. Right click. Go to axis options and then text options. Where you see boxes for minimum and maximum bounds, change minimum to 150 or some other number that lets you spread the data more over the entire graph for better viewing. Now grab the right side of the graph and stretch it out to make it easier to see year-to-year variation.
Show your graph. Select, copy, and paste this graph into your Word document. Take a screenshot of your Excel data and paste that into the Word document after the graph.