First meeting of the Transitional Committee for the design of the Green Climate
Fund
Mexico City, Mexico
28 - 29 April 2011
In order to scale up the provision of long-term financing for developing countries,
Governments at COP 16 in Cancun decided to establish a Green Climate Fund. A
Transitional Committee selected by Parties to the UNFCCC, which will design the details
of the new fund, met for the first time from 28-29 April 2011 in Mexico City,
Mexico.
Ice sheet layers can be read like the pages of a book – if you know the language. In this video, we see how scientists are deciphering the history of Earth's climate from ice cores taken from western Antarctica
This section of the Greenland GISP 2 ice core contains 11 annual layers with summer layers (arrowed) sandwiched between darker winter layers.
Public domain/U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Snow that is compressed into ice forms distinct layers. Ice that is old, such as glaciers and polar ice caps, contain thousands of layers. These layers in ice sheets can be read like the pages of a book – if you know the language. In this video, we see how scientists are deciphering the history of Earth's climate by analysing ice cores taken from western Antarctica.
"Ice cores are a great high-resolution record that allow us to look at hemispheric and global-scale climate change," explained Bess Kaufman, an Earth Sciences doctoral candidate at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine.
Ice contains dust from volcanic eruptions and desert windstorms, pollen, microbes, meteorites, small trapped bubbles of "fossil air" and even changes in the concentrations of Beryllium-10, indicating changes in the strength of solar radiation. Combined, all of these data provide scientists with a surprisingly detailed look at past seasons, and can be used to reconstruct an uninterrupted and detailed climate record extending over hundreds of thousands of years.
"As we look at the chemistry that comes out of the ice, we can see that seasonal record."
Ice cores can be several miles long, but are cut into one metre lengths for ease of handling. To get at the data contained in ice cores, they must be melted so that the water from the outside of the core does not touch water from the centre of the core. The water from the inside of the ice core is analysed to see changes in climate.
"It's a way to look at the interactions [between] the atmosphere, the ocean and the Earth's surface itself," said Ms Kaufman.
It is this richness of data preserved in ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.
6 - 17 June 2011 The 34th session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) will take place from 6-16 June. The second part of the fourteenth session of the AWG-LCA and the second part of the sixteenth session of the AWG-KP will take place from 7-17 June. All sessions will be held at the Maritim Hotel in Bonn. Further information will be made available soon. Logistical information
