Changing Glacier Levels from the Vostok Ice Core and Beyond
The Earth has gone through cycles of temperature fluctuations over it's history that are tied to CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The oldest data that tracks the CO2 in the atmosphere come from the ice core samples taken from Vostok, Russia. This visualization shows the atmospheric CO2 level from 400,550 BCE until today. The line on the bottom of the movie shows this in graphical form, and a higher atmospheric CO2 level is also visualized by a redder color to Earth. The visualization pauses at the year 1850, before the industrial revolution. Notice how the CO2 level (shown in the blue line) increases dramatically up to the year 2018 (and beyond). This increase is substantially larger than any CO2 level seen in the previous data (reaching back over 400,000 years).
This visualization also shows the changing glacier, water and land structures over the same time period and beyond. I apologize, but I have forgotten exactly where this beautiful data originally came from.
This a screen-grab movie from a Uniview module that I created as part of the Adler Planetarium's Kavli Fulldome Lecture Series.
Files are available on my GitHub page: https://github.com/ageller/UniviewVostok
Historical CO2 Record from the Vostok Ice Core came from : J.M. Barnola D. Raynaud C. Lorius Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Geophysique de l'Environnement 38402 Saint Martin d'Heres Cedex, France; N. I. Barkov Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute Beringa Street 38 St. Petersburg 199226, Russia