Interesting article from Joel. Enjoy 🙂
Do places on Earth exist where annual records have been stored for tens of thousands of years and can be accessed today? Ice-cores and tree rings can preserve long records of yearly events but some of the best records come from layers of sediment underlying some lakes which, if formed under the right conditions, can be read like the annual rings of an oak tree. These alternating layers of sediments and sometimes organic material are called varves and by counting each varve sequentially a varve chronology can be constructed. Varve chronologies are a window to the past and have been used to study past climate conditions, the periodicity of volcanic eruptions and as an independent test of radiocarbon (C14) dating methods.
One place were varves have been studied for decades is below a deep lake in Japan: Lake Suigetsu. Here a varve chronology stretching back well over 50,000 years has been established.
An important summary of the significance of this varve chronology can be found…
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