Climate Change Record in Subsurface Temperatures: A Global Perspective

1998/10/09 by Henry N. Pollack, Shaopeng Huang, P.Y. Shen · 6 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Climate change and permafrost #Landslides and related hazards #Tree-ring climate responses #Geothermal gradient #Climate change #Borehole #Climatology #Temperature record #Paleoclimatology #Environmental science #Geology #Physical geography #Geography #Oceanography #Paleontology

paper · doi:10.1126/science.282.5387.279

openalex publication_date 1998/10/09 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02

Abstract

Analyses of underground temperature measurements from 358 boreholes in eastern North America, central Europe, southern Africa, and Australia indicate that, in the 20th century, the average surface temperature of Earth has increased by about 0.5 degreesC and that the 20th century has been the warmest of the past five centuries. The subsurface temperatures also indicate that Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0 degreesC over the past five centuries. The geothermal data offer an independent confirmation of the unusual character of 20th-century climate that has emerged from recent multiproxy studies.

Citations

• Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries
• High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: interpretation, integration and comparison with General Circulation Model control-run temperatures
• Arctic Environmental Change of the Last Four Centuries

Cited by

• Seeing the Wood from the Trees
• Temperature trends over the past five centuries reconstructed from borehole temperatures
• Borehole climate reconstructions: Spatial structure and hemispheric averages
• Millennial temperature reconstruction intercomparison and evaluation
• Climate change and greenhouse gases
• Hockey stick graph (global temperature) [wikipedia]