Instrument Record

The official clock, then the ice.

The is the official clock — , , , , . , the sliver labelled modern time, is 11,700 years. Everything we measure with satellites sits in the .

International Chronostratigraphic Chart

Cohen et al. 2025. The ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart this decade. Episodes 48:105–115. ICS v2024/12. Colours: CGMW. Click a cell · golden spike = GSSP. Hover any dotted term.

ICS · v2024/12

International Chronostratigraphic Chart

International Commission on Stratigraphy · present at the top

Modern time ↓

· colours: Commission for the Geological Map of the World

= millions of years before present · click a cell

0 – 0.0117 Ma(11.7 kyr)

Textbook. Current epoch, 11,700 years — the interglacial we live in. Stages: Greenlandian, Northgrippian, Meghalayan. Defined at the end of the Younger Dryas in a Greenland ice core (NGRIP).

Climate. Relatively stable compared with glacials. Early Holocene warmth in many regions, 8.2 ka and 4.2 ka events, then the industrial rise that has no Holocene analogue in CO₂.

How it relates. The sliver labelled Modern time. The 12-kyr pane is this epoch. All satellite and surface series on the desk sit in the Meghalayan (last 4,200 years). Nested under Quaternary (period). Contains 3 ages. This interval is inside the 800-kyr ice-core window on this page (Bereiter CO₂, Jouzel EDC ΔT).

Paleoclimate history — nested timescales

Bereiter 2015 CO₂ · Jouzel 2007 EDC ΔT · Law Dome + NOAA Mauna Loa · HadCRUT5. Shaded band is the next zoom. Smooth is a 5 kyr (top), 200 yr (Holocene) running mean; last 200 years stay raw so the industrial tick survives.

· ·

·

to ,

Eight keep CO₂ between about 170 and 300 ppm. The vertical tick at the of the top two panes is the — it has no analogue in the ice. are the control above.

Inspect one timescale

Same archives. Pick a band. Hover a label for what the series actually is.

Companion desks

Same project, other questions.

They are not extra series on these charts — they are the arguments about ice versus stomata, the 20th-century blade, the ¹³C fingerprint, the 1988 polar forecasts, and what CERES actually attributes the last 26 years to.

Stomata vs Ice

Plant leaves keep a growing-season count of pores. Antarctic ice keeps bubbles of old air. Ice-core CO₂ is heavily smoothed; stomatal series still carry century-scale swings that only meet the ice at the instrumental splice.

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Hockey Stick Lab

Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 made a shaft-and-blade by overweighting the Sheep Mountain bristlecone (CA534) by as much as 390×. Strip that weight and the 1910–1938 climb is already there. Drag the weight yourself against HadCRUT5.

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δ¹³C Ledger

The “fossil isotopic signature” is not a raw intercept. Station Keeling plots sit near −13‰; the textbook −28‰ is an isoflux term after gravity, diffusion, blank and scale corrections. The ledger separates observation from the model step.

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Arctic and Antarctic vs the 1988 estimates

1988-era scenarios warmed both poles under well-mixed greenhouse gas. The split is not that: Arctic air rose; Antarctic did not. Sea-level rise since 1900 is expansion-scale, not a melt pulse matching those polar-ice forecasts.

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NZ Atlas

Nikolov & Zeller and Goessling, Rackow & Jung land on the same CERES fact: the last ~26 years of warming track absorbed sunlight from a falling planetary albedo. They split on story; the satellite number they both use is albedo, not CO₂ forcing.

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