Deciphering California’s Proxy Data Through Clues and Similarities of Physical Characteristics
By Shelly Kniss Geog 178

Significant changes have been occurring in Earths’ climate history. Humans as an apex species are very prosperous in their adaptation of the world around and the world they have created. Past practices of this adaptation are now catching up with them. And to further the acknowledgment of the contributions to the rapid and increasing changes of Earth’s climate, paleoclimatologists survey and analyze these natural phenomena. Looking for clues and similarities to the vacillating conditions we see throughout the world. The West without Water by B. Lynne Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam convey (even to the most novice naturalist) …show more content…
The authors Ingram and Malamud-Roam give credit to Kim Cobb a Geochemist studying the Palmyra Atoll, “one of the most spectacular and diverse coral reefs in the world… Cobb and her team have faithfully recorded the El Nino events of the twentieth century as reflected in the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen 16 in the coral skeletons” (157). In collecting fossilized corral (Figure 3), the density of the specimens’ attribute to the growth rate during different fluctuations of ocean temperatures; these densities are attributed to El Nino and La Nina patterns (157). A timeline was extended back to the ‘Medieval drought’ during the tenth and fourteenth century and the ‘Little Ice Age’ during the seventeenth century. Cobbs research (178) suggested in a La Nina condition, the coral was less dense, showing slow growth during cooler ocean temperatures. This coincides with the collapse of the Pueblo and other cultures across the Southwest and California. While the specimens of the corral with greater density suggested and increase in Pacific Ocean temperatures, corresponding with El Nino events during the Little Ice age with wetter and flooding in California and the American West (158). It is because of these tiny coral polyps building atop of each other, fossilizing over time, that paleoclimatologists have a better understanding of the past 200 million years of Earth’s changing climate