Heather A. Viles

2. The present is the key to the past

Heather’s article crossed my desk at the time I was working as a session convener for the European Geophysical Union conference (scheduled for Vienna, April 2018) where we plan to run a session devoted to cycles of climate change of the Holocene. Ocean deep drilling is one of the essential sources of data for such studies, whereby sediments with a high rate of deposition in ocean trenches are sampled and studied for age and proxy sea-surface temperature data using a range of isotopic and organic molecular structure criteria. Such data is then used to build a time series of temperature change over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The results have potential importance beyond mere geological history, for an understanding of past climate cycles feeds into our current understanding of climate change and the relative contributions of natural and anthropogenic CO2 forcing factors. Such relationships and their causative factors will keep today’s students busy at their desks, and at the benches of vessels such as Joides Resolution, for decades to come. Education matters