Fossils may help predict climate changes

The article I found this week was about looking at 3.5 million year old fossils and using them to find patterns of climate change in the past and using them to possibly predict the future climate changes. They also discussed looking to the poles for climate changes because they are the first places to be effected. They can use changes there to predict changes that could happen all over the world. They are trying to construct an ancient climate record that holds clues about the long term effects of the Earth's levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One thing they discovered was that the summertime arctic temperatures about 3.5 million years ago was about 18 to 28 degrees warmer than it is today. They can determine this by measuring the isotopic content of oxygen in a combination of fossilized mollusk and plant samples. It shows what temperature the specimens were formed.

I thought this article was really interesting. I did not know you could figure out the temperature of a specific time just by using fossils. I am interested to see what else they can do with this information. I found this article on Science Daily, its called: Ancient Fossils Hold Clues for Predicting Future Climate Change.