Where ancient mud reveals the longest record of climate from the tropics

To understand the history of the Earth’s climate, researchers often rely on things like ice cores, which contain layered frozen insights of thousands of years of history. However, in the tropics long-term records like these have been absent. Now researchers have uncovered a sediment core in Peru which reveals around 700,000 years of climatic history. Lake Junín is a high-­elevation intermontane lake in the inner-­tropics of the South American Andes and one of the few lakes in the tropical Andes that can provide a continuous record throughout the last glacial cycle. Aditionally, it is ideally situated to record long­-term variations in the South American Summer Monsoon. The lake was drilled in 2015 to recover sediment cores which will provide the longest independently­-dated record of tropical water balance, glacier variability, vegetation history, and paleomagnetic secular variation for the region. Click the image below to read this very interesting scientfic research by Rodbell, D.T., Hatfield, R.G., Abbott, M.B. et al. "700,000 years of tropical Andean glaciation". Nature 607, 301–306 (2022).