Proxy (climate) - Lake and Ocean Sediments

Lake and Ocean Sediments

Similar to their study on other proxies, paleoclimatologists examine oxygen isotopes in the contents of ocean sediments. Likewise, they measure the layers of varve (deposited fine and coarse silt or clay) laminating lake sediments. Lake varves are primarily influenced by:

  • Summer temperature, which shows the energy available to melt seasonal snow and ice
  • Winter snowfall, which determines the level of disturbance to sediments when melting occurs
  • Rainfall

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