Nature press release, 2. September 2004:

Climate: Northern lights, northern depths (pp147-151; N&V)

Much recent knowledge of climate change over the past few hundred thousand
years comes from cores drilled into ancient ice in Antarctica and Greenland.
The undisturbed state of the ice as it was slowly deposited has allowed
researchers to trace global climatic events with almost year-by-year
resolution over tens of millennia. Two deep ice cores from central
Greenland, drilled in the 1990s, have played a key role in climate
reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere, but the chronology read from the
oldest and deepest sections of the cores was uncertain, due to crumpling of
the ice near the bedrock. This deep-level distortion has led to a good deal
of frustration in the research community - but now Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and
colleagues present an undisturbed climate record from a North Greenland ice
core, in this week's Nature.
The new core extends all the way through the last glacial period, back to
the last interglacial period (123,000 years before the present) when the
climate was appreciably warmer than it is today (to get some idea of this,
hippopotami wallowed as far north as Yorkshire in England, and lions stalked
their prey in what is now central London).
Differences between the new core and those from central Greenland illuminate
features of climate change during the last ice age. The North Greenland
climate record shows a slow decline in temperatures that marked the
initiation of the last glacial period and, most surprisingly, reveals a
hitherto unrecognized warm spell initiated by an abrupt climate warming
about 115,000 years ago, before glacial conditions were fully developed.
This event does not appear to have an immediate counterpart from Antarctic
ice-cores, suggesting that the climate 'see-saw' between the hemispheres
(which dominated the last glacial period) was not operating at this time.
Kurt M. Cuffey discusses the work in an accompanying News and Views article.

CONTACT:
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen (Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Copenhagen, Denmark)
Tel: + 45 35 32 0556, E-mail: ddj@gfy.ku.dk <mailto:ddj@gfy.ku.dk

Kurt M. Cuffey (University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 510 643 1641, E-mail: kcuffey@socrates.berkeley.edu
<mailto:kcuffey@socrates.berkeley.edu

***********
For more information contact:
Belgium:                      
Regi Lorrain: +32 2 650 227, glaciol@ulb.ac.be

Denmark:    
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen: +45 35 32 05 56, ddj@gfy.ku.dk,
Sigfus J Johnsen: +45 35 32 05 58,sigfus@gfy.ku.dk
Joergen Peder Steffensen: +45 35 32 05 57,  jps@gfy.ku.dk

France:                      
Jean Jouzel +33 1 39 25 58 16, jouzel@lsce.saclay.cea.fr,
Dominique Raynaud: +33 4 76 82 42 52, raynaud@lgge.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr

Germany:                      
Heinz Miller: +49 471 4831 1210, miller@awi-bremerhaven.de,
Hubertus Fischer: +49 471 4831 1174, hufischer@awi-bremerhaven.de

Iceland:                      
Arny Sveinbjoernsdottir: +345 1 694 784, arny@raunvis.hi.is

Japan:                      
Yoshiyuki Fujii: +81 3 3962 4742, fujii@pmg.nipr.ac.jp

Sweden:                      
Margaretha Hansson: +46 86 74 78 65, margaretha.hansson@natgeo.su.se

Switzerland:
Thomas Stoecker: +41 31 631 44 64, stocker@climate.unibe.ch

USA:                      
James W. C. White: +1 303 492 5494, James.White@spot.colorado.edu