Topic
Scientific field reconstructing past climate using proxies like sediments, ice cores, corals, and fossils to trace temperature, drought, and circulation shifts.
Growth lines and isotopes in one giant clam shell from Jiigurru put northern Great Barrier Reef summers around 1800 at 0.9 to 1.2C cooler than in 1995-2015. Winters were nearly unchanged, so this site's warming has come mostly in the hot season, on the evidence of one animal.
Reality
Woods Hole researchers pushed the record of Indian-Pacific coupling back to the early 1600s using corals, tree rings and stalagmites. Only one earlier interval, 1810 to 1850, shows the relationship breaking down.
Reality
Planktonic foraminifera coil left or right, and sometimes every ocean switches at once. The explanation offered in 1959 was temperature; genetics undercut it, and the newest proposal is an evolutionary sweep.
Reality
A Southampton-led team models 100 million years of East Antarctic uplift and puts the ice sheet's origin in the deep Earth, not the atmosphere.
Reality
A Montana State-led study in PNAS reads pollen, charcoal, arsenic and diatoms from closed lakes in the Lower Geyser Basin. Its framing: dry centuries brought less hydrothermal activity and more fire.
Reality
Two decades of Karoo Supergroup work is now one open-access review, and it reports that the basin's climate story is less tidy and its dating better constrained than in 2000.
Reality