Starting Climate Science Research

To start off my research, I was most interested in the question: How has the climate of the earth changed over time? Wanting to start off broad, I basically pasted this question into the Google search bar. I was somewhat surprised to find an excellent source as one of the first results. NASA's website had an article on climate change that immediately gave me an impressive visual of the carbon dioxide levels over approximately the last 400,000 years. This was precisely the kind of information I wanted.

Below, in the same article, I found some more information. Throughout time, Earth’s climate has always changed. Often, these changes have been because of slight variations in the path of the planet’s orbit, since changes in the rotation of the Earth around the sun affects how much energy it receives. In the past 650,000 years, there have been seven cycles of glaciers on Earth advancing and retreating.

I was not familiar with this terminology concerning glaciers, so I found another website, eduweb, that explained these terms clearly. A glacier retreat is the shrinking of glaciers, and an advance is when glaciers grow. Glaciers advance when precipitation causes them to grow more than melting and sublimation make them shrink. They retreat when the opposite occurs. According to the website, most glaciers today are retreating at higher rates than ever recorded.

After all this, I clicked on another article about global warming that seemed promising. I found the link at the bottom of the NASA article. Apparently, glacier retreat has increased significantly in the past ten years. This can be related to the rise in sea level that has been rising by about 1.77 millimeters per year over the last century. This number is much higher than that of the average rise in sea level over the past thousand years. The website also had two interesting charts to back up these facts.

I found information about past and present trends in carbon dioxide levels, glacier retreat, and sea level in this research session. I want to do the same with other facets of climate next time.