A commenter observed that the forthcoming PAGES2K received over 50 pages of review comments from one reviewer. One wonders what he had to say about the PAGES2K South American network which has some very odd characteristics. Here is a list of proxies with a couple of interesting features highlighted. First, note that the “proxy” network […]
Lonnie Thompson has done a much better job of archiving data for his recent update Quelccaya – see NOAA here – both in terms of information and promptness. Quelccaya is familiar territory for Thompson as it was the location of his first tropical ice cores (1983) and his first publication of this type. Thompson published […]
A while ago, I summarized an interesting article from the Venezuelan Andes. In that case, they concluded that the glaciers did not exist in the MWP. The post is worth re-reading in the context of Quelccaya. The authors used the continuous deposition of sediments in a proglacial lake to yield evidence of the discontinuous movements […]
James Lane here noticed a couple of other useful references on Quelccaya and related the anecdotal information to this information. He observed: It took me ages to put this post together, juggling between different sites. I don’t think one can conclude anything from the information, as presented, except that the moss has grown at higher […]
Thompson et al (PNAS 2006) stated that the discovery of a plant deposit with radiocarbon age of around 4000 BP (calibrated to 5138 BP) near the receding margin of the Quelccaya glacier provided “strong evidence” that the “current retreat of Quelccaya is unprecedented for the last 5 millennia”. The plant deposit is Distichia muscoides, which […]
Just when I’d despaired of ever seeing anything as mundane as a site map of the Quelccaya glacier on a scale that did not also show all of South America, I stumbled (due to the wonders of google) on an interesting article by Mark et al (2002), a geologist from Ohio State – the same […]
The Quelccaya glacier is at a similar latitude to Kilimanjaro and is also receding. It’s a logical point of comparison. Core 1 is 163.6 m deep (Summit Core- 154.8 m) and is attributed a start date of 470 AD (Summit Core: 744 AD). Annual dust layers are a guide to dating in the upper portions. […]
Quelccaya accumulation are 2 of only 14 proxies in MBH99. I think that it was the very first Mann proxy series that I posted about (circa May 2003), as the underlying data looked very strange when plotted. Hans Erren has posted up an interesting analysis which both explains the strange appearance of the series as […]
Climate Audit 