Ice core data - Ice Ages and Interglacials: Measurements, Interpretation, and Models - page 154

suggest that it may have been warmer. ''In England, many fossils of hippopo-

tamuses and other animals only found today in tropical and subtropical regions
have been found. In Greenland, ice cores indicate temperatures of 5 C higher than
today

...

...

.'' He also said that ''the surface waters of many seas were between 2
and 3 C warmer than today, and sea level was 4-6m higher.
Marsh (2008) pointed out that variability of high-latitude solar input does not
explain why an ice age should terminate and, since CO 2 concentration tends to lag
the temperature, he suggested that variable CO 2 also does not cause a termination.
He presented 10 Be data that are compatible with the notion that increased solar
activity leading to less penetration of cosmic rays into the atmosphere may have
been a cause of the previous interglacial about 130,000 years ago. However, this
single time period is not adequate to show cause-effect and, in order to provide a
more convincing argument, he would have to show a rise and fall of

10 Be data in

lockstep with ice age-interglacial cycles over at least several cycles.

4.5 DATA FROM HIGH-ELEVATION ICE CORES

According to Wikipedia:

''The non-polar ice caps, such as found on mountain tops, were traditionally
ignored as serious places to drill ice cores because it was generally believed the ice
would not be more than a few thousand years old, however since the 1970s ice has
been found that is older, with clear chronological dating and climate signals
going as far back as the beginning of the most recent Ice Age.
Mountain ice cores have been retrieved in the Andes in South America,
Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Tibet, various locations in the Himalayas, Alaska,
Russia and elsewhere. Mountain ice cores are logistically very dicult to obtain.
The drilling equipment must be carried by hand, organized as a mountaineering
expedition with multiple stage camps, to altitudes upwards of 20,000 feet
(helicopters are not safe), and the multi-ton ice cores must then be transported
back down the mountain, all requiring mountaineering skills and equipment and
logistics and working at low oxygen in extreme environments in remote third
world countries. Scientists may stay at high altitude on the ice caps for up to 20 to
50 days setting altitude endurance records that even professional climbers do not
obtain. American scientist Lonnie Thompson has been pioneering this area since
the 1970s, developing lightweight drilling equipment that can be carried by
porters, solar-powered electricity, and a team of mountaineering-scientists.''

A number of news releases since 2002 claimed that the ice core drilled in the
Guliya ice cap in Tibet in the 1990s reaches back to 760,000 years, but this writer
was not able to find any verification of that claim.
Thompson et al. (2005) reviewed data on d 18 O from high-elevation ice cores at
moderate latitudes. Most of these ice cores date back a comparatively short time
(10 to 26 kybp ). However, the Guliya core from Tibet reached back to 125 kybp .