Determining Past Climate Change - Ocean Floor Sediments

• Scientists have employed many methods to piece together the past climatic record

• One such method is to look at sediments on the ocean floor

• Research vessels produce sediment profiles from the bottom of the ocean

• the sediment contains calcium carbonate shells from organisms that have lived near the earth's surface in the past

• the type of calcium carbonate shell can tell you something about temperature since some live only within narrow temperature ranges.

image adopted from The Amosphere by Lutgens and Tarbuck, © 1998 by Prentice-Hall, Inc