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Exploring Climate Archives: Loess, Radioactive Dating, and Atmospheric Models

Learn about loess deposits, radioactive decay, and climate models in GEOL 3100 class. Discover the intricacies of 14C dating and ice rafted debris. Understand different atmospheric models and test their responses to changing conditions.

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Exploring Climate Archives: Loess, Radioactive Dating, and Atmospheric Models

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  1. Climate Archives, Data, and Models GEOL 3100 Earth’s Climate and Environment: Past, Present, and Future

  2. What is Loess? How can you tell one generation of loess deposit from another?

  3. Radioactive decay

  4. Activity • Everybody pretend you are a radioactive isotope and stand on one side of the room • Every 30 seconds, half of you go to the other side of the room and become a daughter isotope • Questions: • Does the half life vary with the amount of parent? • How many half lives did our chronometer work for? • When do you get the biggest change in the amount of daughter atoms? • Once all the parent has become daughter, can you use the system to date the material? • If you didn’t know how many parent atoms you started out with, could you still use the system for dating?

  5. 14C Dating • 14C is created in atmosphere by extraterrestrial neutrons bombarding 14N atoms • 14C half life is 5780 years • What potential problems do you see with 14C dating? • 14C ages: assume 14C concentration in atmosphere does not change • Calibrated 14C ages: use paired 14C and other system ages to calculate past 14C concentration in the atmosphere

  6. ICE RAFTED DEBRIS

  7. COMBINED USE OF DATA AND MODELS

  8. What type of model is this? One dimensional Atmospheric model What kind of questions might this model be useful in answering? Effects of changes in energy balance on global average temperature

  9. What type of model is this? Two dimensional Atmospheric model What kind of questions might this model be useful in answering? Effects of changes in energy balance on latitudinal distribution of temperature

  10. What type of model is this? Three dimensional Atmospheric model or GCM What kind of questions might this model be useful in answering? Ideally, how Earth’s climate system would respond to external and internal perturbations

  11. Models are tested by simulating modern conditions How well does this GCM do at reproducing January temperatures? What type of test would you perform to see how the model responds to changing, for example, the albedo of tundra? A sensitivity study tests the model response to changes in one boundary condition at a time

  12. In the interest of time, we will not cover Geochemical models

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