Providing Clues About Future Climate Change.

• Position: ICE AGE

A well-known period of abrupt climate change 12,000 years ago occurred rapidly in northern latitudes, but much more gradually in equatorial regions, a discovery by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, that could prove important for understanding and responding to future temperature fluctuations.

The research focuses on the Younger Dryas, a cooling period that started when the North Atlantic current stopped circulating. The event caused Earth's Northern Hemisphere to enter into a deep chill, with temperatures in Greenland dropping by approximately 18[degrees]F in less than a decade.

The event also resulted in rainfall decreasing in places as far away as the Philippines. However, whereas temperatures in Greenland responded quickly to the ocean current shutdown and subsequent reboot 1,000 years later, it took hundreds of years for rainfall in the Philippines to be affected and to recover.

"We found that the temperature in Greenland is like a small ship that you can stop and turn quickly because of the influence of sea ice in the region, while rainfall in the tropics is like a big ship that takes a long time to course correct," explains study leader Jud Partin, research associate at the Institute for Geophysics.

The...