Paleo Slide Set: Polar Ice Cores
Methane Records

One of the major goals of paleoclimatologists is to extract climatic information 
from as many sites on the globe as possible. The more information we have about past climate, 
the clearer the picture gets. Since snow accumulates more slowly in Antarctica, records from 
Vostok do not have quite the temporal resolution of Greenland cores. As you can see from this 
graph, however, measurements of methane concentration from the GRIP (the European counterpart to GISP2) 
and Vostok cores agree very well in broad terms, illustrating large-scale climatic events such as the 
Younger Dryas cold event at ~11,000 yr B. P. 

Photo Credits:
Thomas Andrews