What if the variations in magnetism during the Ediacaran weren’t random at all? What if they had a global geometry with some order amid the chaos That’s the finding of a new study in the journal Science Advances from an international, Yale-led team of researchers.

Large changes in global sea level, fueled by fluctuations in ice sheet growth and decay, occurred throughout the last ice age, rather than just toward the end of that period. 

 

The findings represent a significant change in researchers’ understanding of how the Pleistocene – the geological period from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago and commonly known as the last ice age – developed.

Kyoto, Japan -- Global climate action based on the Paris Agreement is progressing, but concerns have been raised that the future projections and scenarios forming the scientific basis for these actions are biased toward a limited number of regions and research institutions.

Climate research teams have created long-term climate mitigation scenarios known as integrated assessment models, which map the technological feasibility of climate change countermeasures, their associated costs, and their long-term effects. Many of these are model comparison projects, a method in which research teams from multiple countries and institutions conduct model simulations based on similar experimental settings and compare the results.

However, only a limited number of research teams can participate in these projects, and the inevitable result is that they do not adequately reflect diverse global perspectives, in particular those of developing countries.