Oldest ice offers view of Earth before the ice ages

Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.

The fossil record documents only a small fraction of all organisms that have ever inhabited Earth. Fossilization is a rare process, and most organisms never become fossils. Moreover, the fossil record only exhibits fossils that have been discovered. Nevertheless, sedimentary rock fossils of long-lived, abundant, hard-bodied organisms dominate the fossil record. These fossils offer valuable information, such as an organism's physical form, behavior, and age. Studying the fossil record helps...

Scientists record evolutionary history by analyzing fossil, morphological, and genetic data. The fossil record documents the history of life on Earth and provides evidence for evolution. However, both fossil and living organisms offer evidence that outlines Earth’s evolutionary history.

Water exists in any one of the three classical states: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam or water vapor). The state of water depends on i) the intermolecular forces that draw molecules together and ii) the kinetic energy that leads to movements that pull them apart.
Water freezes when the intermolecular forces are greater than the kinetic energy. Unlike most other substances, water is less dense in its solid state than in its liquid state. This is because each water molecule can form...

Climate refers to the prevailing weather conditions in a specific area over an extended period. As the saying goes, “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.” Climate is influenced by geographic factors, such as latitude, terrain, and proximity to bodies of water.

Radioactivity is a spontaneous disintegration of an unstable nuclide and is a random process, as all the nuclei in the sample do not decay simultaneously. The number of disintegrations per unit time is called the activity (A), which is directly proportional to the number of nuclei in the sample. The decay constant (λ) is an average probability of decay per nucleus in unit time.