-
Jan 9, 2008 5:36 pm US/Pacific
-
Digg |
Facebook |
E-mail
|
Print
Off The Beaten Path: Cave Climate
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―
Surprising new clues on global warming are being discovered here in Northern California, but you've got to go deep underground to find them.
Moaning Cavern is one of the oldest, most spectacular caves in Northern California. Tourists can either walk down sixteen stories on a spiral staircase or rappel in. The cave is fragile and visitors are urged to look but not touch.
Steve Fairchild owns this cave. He's helping U.C. Davis scientists drill out sample cores from this big stalagmite to gather more data on global climate change.
He said, "The formations in caves are almost growing living things and they record as they go. So, we get materials trapped from the past."
This is our clue to exactly what has happened on the planet, which hopefully will give us a clue as to what will happen on the planet.
While Steve bores twelve inch deep holes with a diamond drill, the UCD team gathers samples of the water dripping into the cave.
The cavern is a couple of hundred feet right down. Surprisingly, when it rains up there, it only takes an hour or so for the water to get down there.
So, the weather patterns for about the last fifteen thousand years are captured in the cores just drilled out of the cavern. They show we came from a long ice age into a warm period, then quickly back into a short ice age of about a thousand years and then back to a warm period.
Scientists are finding the cavern's record is matching data from half way around the world.
UC Davis geologist, Dr. Isabel Montanez says, "The ice cores from Greenland that really are the hold grail that have captured this event is one for one in it's record for what we are seeing here."
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)