Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Scientists found that they could tease out a wealth of data from every annual increment. By analyzing the ice with a mass spectrometer, they could calculate what the average temperature on Greenland had been in any given year. And by extracting the gases contained in tiny bubbles of trapped air they could reconstruct changes in the atmosphere.

In the nineteen-nineties, a team of American researchers working at Summit succeeded in drilling all the way from the top of the ice sheet to the bedrock. In the process, they pulled up thousands of long, skinny cylinders of ice—two miles’ worth. In ice from fifteen hundred and two feet down, there was snow that fell when Nero was emperor; at twenty-three hundred and fifty feet, snow from the reign of Tutankhamun. At the very bottom was snow that fell before the start of the last glaciation.

Analysis of the core showed, in extraordinary detail, how temperatures in central Greenland had varied during the last ice age, which in the U.S. is called the Wisconsin. As would be expected, there was a steep drop in temperatures at the start of the Wisconsin, around a hundred thousand years ago, and a steep rise toward the end of it. But the analysis also revealed something disconcerting. In addition to the long-term oscillations, the ice recorded dozens of shorter, wilder swings. During the Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearly thirty degrees lower than they are now. Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somewhat more gradually. Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt. Temperatures settled down, and a time of relative climate tranquillity began. This is the period that includes all of recorded history, a coincidence that, presumably, is no coincidence.’ (from the New Yorker)

A reminder of what is at stake.