Reconstructing Earth's Climate History. Kristen St. John

responsibilities have included oceanography, oceanography for educators, field geology for educators, natural hazards, physical and historical geology, and stratigraphy and sedimentation.

      Foreword from First Edition

      Climate change has many manifestations, rising greenhouse gas concentrations, sea‐level rise, abrupt climate change, ocean acidification, reduced Arctic sea ice, droughts, floods, hurricanes, melting glaciers and ice sheets, to mention a few. Few would doubt that climate is the environmental issue of our generation, but what scientific evidence causes so much concern about human influence on climate? Some might argue from the point of view of planetary physics; atmospheric greenhouse gases naturally affect the Earth’s temperature and human carbon emissions have elevated carbon dioxide and methane concentrations and, as a consequence, global temperature. Others might claim that predictive climate models project future temperatures, rainfall patterns and sea levels that threaten society. The striking rise in global temperature observed from instruments over the past century also raises concern about future trends and impacts.

      As important as these topics are, one field – paleoclimatology – is unique in providing the requisite baseline of natural climate variability against which human‐induced climate change must be assessed. A rapidly growing discipline that draws on ocean, atmosphere, and Earth sciences, paleoclimatology is today an essential foundation of climate science because it addresses climate history beyond the limited instrumental record and during climate states that the Earth may very well experience in the future. Consider these facts: Ice core records provide the primary evidence that modern greenhouse gas concentrations lie far outside the bounds of natural variability of the last 800,000 years. Thanks to tree rings, speleothems, and other records we now know that rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures during the last century cannot be explained by volcanic or solar activity but required forcing by elevated greenhouse gas concentrations. Lake and marine sediment records confirm what is suspected from satellite records – that polar climates are changing at unprecedented rates. Marine sediment records show us that ocean acidification – a major concern owing to human‐induced perturbations of the global carbon cycle – typically accompanied massive increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the geological past.

      Reconstructing Earth’s Climate History – a novel classroom and laboratory educational guide by Kristen St John, R Mark Leckie, Kate Pound, Megan Jones and Lawrence Krissek – represents a major, long overdue effort to educate future generations about methods used to reconstruct climate history. From an academic perspective, the book exemplifies the authors’ lifelong dedication to teaching. It includes practical discussions and exercises that teach students how climate history is reconstructed from “proxies” extracted from sediments, ice cores, speleothems, tree rings, coral skeletons, and other archives. It prepares students to engage in field and laboratory research to distinguish natural from anthropogenic climate change, evaluate computer model simulations of climate under elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, and clarify the causes and impact of abrupt climate changes. Equally important, Kristen St. John and her co‐authors also strive to explain why climate history is, and will continue to be, so relevant to policy debates about climate change. It is hoped that students of both natural and social sciences will use it for the benefit of the Earth’s environments and future societies.

      Thomas M. Cronin, Senior Research Geologist, US Geological Survey Reston Virginia

      Acknowledgments

      The first edition of this book evolved out of collaborative efforts on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) grant (#0737335). The goal of our NSF project was to make the science of scientific ocean drilling research accessible to educators. We set out to write seven data‐rich exercises for the undergraduate classroom. However, we accomplished much more than we set out to do – we essentially developed an entire undergraduate course curriculum that explores the record of Earth's climate history. We had written a book. The first edition of this book would not have happened without the initial funding from NSF, as well as the support of the Consortium of Ocean Leadership, the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP; formerly the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program), and Antarctic Geological Drilling Program (ANDRILL). We are especially grateful to Leslie Peart, former education director of Ocean Leadership's Deep Earth Academy, who was instrumental in facilitating education and outreach for IODP for many years. It was her vision of the School of Rock Program (which still exists today) that seeded the collaboration of the author team. We are thankful to Cathy Manduca, director of the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College; her insight into the undergraduate curriculum, workshop development, and dissemination were valuable to us, as they have been to the broader geoscience education community. We are grateful to Eric Pyle, professor of geology at James Madison University (JMU) and evaluator of our NSF grant; his input gave us much to consider about teaching and learning. The first edition of the book could not have come together so smoothly without the skilled help of students Serena Dameron and Sarah Rangel, and graphic design consultant Jason Mallett. We thank students Allison (Ali) Dim, Kate Kaldor, and Casey Maslock for helping with some new content for the second edition. We greatly appreciate the constructive comments from colleagues who reviewed draft chapters from the first or second editions. Their scientific and/or pedagogical expertise helped improve the quality of the book, as did the feedback from our students who used draft versions of these chapters in classes and labs. We specifically thank: Stephen Schellenburg, Tom Cronin, Robert DeConto, Steve Petsch, Debbie Thomas, Jackie Hams, David Voorhees, Leilani Arthurs, Paul Holm, Bill Lukens, Kaustubh Thirumalai, Terry Quinn, David Elliot, Berry Lyons, Francine McCarthy, John Olesik, Jim Brey, Tom Gill, Steve Hovan, several anonymous reviewers, and the many faculty whom we have interacted with in professional development workshops that used this book. Very special thanks to graphic designer, Jess Lambert, for working with Kate Pound and the rest of the authors to develop the cover design for the second edition. We would also like to thank the editors, and the development and production teams at Wiley, especially Ian Francis, Delia Sandford, Anna Bassett, Kevin Fung, Marilyn Grant, and Vivien Ward for their guidance on the first edition, and Rosie Hayden, Andrew Harrison, and Karthika Sridharan for their guidance on the second edition. What fantastic, professional teams to work with!

      This content of the book is based in large part upon practices and results of scientific ocean drilling, especially scientific work of IODP, and its predecessor programs (i.e. ODP and DSDP), as well as the scientific work of the ANDRILL program. While program names have changed through different funding cycles (and will again in the future), the international commitment to support scientific ocean drilling has advanced the research community's understanding of how Earth's climate system works. These insights are an important backdrop for understanding modern climate change, for testing models of future climate, and for evidence‐based science communication with educators, students, the public‐at‐large, and policy makers.

      Book Introduction to the Second Edition for Students and Instructors

      Dear Students and Instructors,

      We are excited to provide you with the opportunity to learn about Earth's climate of the past, and its relevance to climate of the present and future, through an inquiry‐based curricula design. This is the second edition of Reconstructing Earth's Climate History – Inquiry‐Based Exercises for Lab and Class, and we have worked hard to maintain the best content of the first edition, while also expanding topics, updating exercises, and reorganizing content to scaffold data‐rich material and support your learning. As the title of the book implies, this is a book that has you, the student, playing an important active role; you are to make observations, ask questions, wrestle with uncertainly, interact with your classmates and instructor, and work to synthesize information, pose evidence‐based hypotheses, and infer broad implications from case study examples. All