The National Climatic Data Center says 2001
will go down as the second hottest year ever
with global temperatures almost a full degree
above average.
The big debate is how fast the world is
warming. Some University of Texas scientists are
working on the answer underground.
A team of researchers from UT are underground
to look for clues about Texas weather.
Working in a wild section of Natural Bridge
Caverns, Dr. Jay Banner and his team collect
glass slides they placed here a month ago.
They're looking for calcite deposits, the same
mineral that creates the beautiful formations.
The formations grow extremely slowly. The
largest are hundreds of thousands of years old.
To study them is like looking back in time.
"What we're doing is using the growth rate of
the calcite as a proxy for rainfall in this
region," Dr. Jay Banner with UT Geological
Sciences said, "We're able to sample and extract
those small amounts of calcite and chemically
analyze them to see what kind of chemical
records there are that we may interpret as
changes in water flow and/or climate change in
the past."
From here, these samples will be heading back
to the lab for detailed chemical analysis.
They also take samples to try to extract DNA
from ancient microbes.
"There's very little knowledge in the
biological community about how microbes,
populations of microbes, change over millennial
time scales," Banner said.
Their work could lead to a better
understanding of global warming.
"If we study them on a longer term time
scale, then we begin to get an understanding of
long term variability before human influence,"
Banner
said.
