Reading Ancient Climate Records
Explain how ice cores preserve ancient air bubbles, isotope ratios, and volcanic markers allowing reconstruction of temperature and CO2 going back 800,000 years; describe tree rings, ocean sediment cores, coral skeletons, and pollen records as additional climate proxies; explain how climate models are built and validated against the palaeoclimate record; describe the IPCC process of synthesising scientific evidence across thousands of studies to produce consensus assessments
Typical age: 12–14 years
“Can your child explain how scientists know what the climate was like 500,000 years ago — what kind of 'time capsules' exist in nature that preserve ancient air and temperature records, and how do scientists read them?”
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