Exploring Forty Million Years of Climate Change

Profiles in Success: National Oceonography Centre, Southampton (NOCS)

Scientists at the National Oceonography Centre, Southampton are helping improve understanding of the Earth’s changing climate, using Apple’s Xgrid technology to investigate data about deep sea sediment that is millions of years old. The researchers, backed by the Apple Research & Technology Support (ARTS) programme, hope climate records from the past will help explain how dramatic rises in CO2 levels might affect us in the future.

“The last time in history we had the kind of CO2 concentrations predicted for the next thirty or forty years was probably 40 million years ago, so we have to look back that far to see how the Earth’s climate will behave”, says Dr Heiko Pälike, who is leading the research project.

“Apple’s Xgrid technology gives us the computing power and flexibility we need to systematically model the global carbon cycle, using sedimentation data from the Pacific Ocean that stretches back 42 million years”.

The National Oceonography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) is a joint venture between the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the University of Southampton. With 520 research scientists, lecturers and seagoing staff, and over 700 undergraduate and postgraduate students, NOCS is one of the world’s top five oceanographic research institutions.

The NERC helps to fund the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, a major international research initiative to explore deep sea science using purpose built drilling ships and platforms.

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s work is important to researchers at NOCS, particularly to members of its Palaeoceanography and Palaeoclimate Research Group. The Group’s mission is to understand past changes in the Earth’s system in order to help future climate prediction.

Key information about our past is contained in layers of undisturbed sedimentary rocks, and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program provides unique historical records from beneath the sea floor.

Dr Heiko Pälike is a Reader in the Research Group, with a significant involvement in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. He has been on a number of drilling expeditions and obtained sediment cores from hundreds of metres below the seabed. His research into data provided by the cores — published in the eminent Science journal — revealed that the Earth’s climate over millions of years has been affected by variations in its orbit around the sun.

According to Dr Pälike: “We have made great strides in improving the record of climatic cycles in the past tens of millions of years, using the sedimentary core data. What we have to do now is achieve a greater understanding of the Earth’s ‘climate machine’ — the mechanisms that operate during changing conditions such as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations”.

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