Abstract
Paleoclimate records are extremely rich sources of information about the past history of the Earth system. We take an information-theoretic approach to analyzing data from the WAIS Divide ice core, the longest continuous and highest-resolution water isotope record yet recovered from Antarctica. We use weighted permutation entropy to calculate the Shannon entropy rate from these isotope measurements, which are proxies for a number of different climate variables, including the temperature at the time of deposition of the corresponding layer of the core. We find that the rate of information production in these measurements reveals issues with analysis instruments, even when those issues leave no visible traces in the raw data. These entropy calculations also allow us to identify a number of intervals in the data that may be of direct relevance to paleoclimate interpretation, and to form new conjectures about what is happening in those intervals—including periods of abrupt climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
Since ice sheets preferentially collect \(^{16}\mathrm {O}\), while oceans preferentially collect \(^{18}\mathrm {O}\).
- 2.
The accumulation data from the WDC has not yet been released publicly, so we cannot include a plot of it here, but there are some extremely interesting correspondences that we hope to be able to include in a few months, when we are allowed to share those data.
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Garland, J., Jones, T.R., Bradley, E., James, R.G., White, J.W.C. (2016). A First Step Toward Quantifying the Climate’s Information Production over the Last 68,000 Years. In: Boström, H., Knobbe, A., Soares, C., Papapetrou, P. (eds) Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XV. IDA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9897. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46349-0_30
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