COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ice cores drilled through a glacier more than four miles up in the Himalayan Mountains have yielded a highly detailed record of the last 1,000 years of earth’s climate in the high Tibetan Plateau. Based on an analysis of the ice, both the last decade and the last 50 years were the warmest in 1,000 years. The core also showed a clear record of at least eight major droughts caused by a failure of the South Asian Monsoon, the worst of these a catastrophic seven-year-long dry spell that cost the lives of more than 600,000 people. The new findings, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, outline data recovered from three cores drilled through the Dasuopu Glacier, a two-kilometer-wide ice field that straddles a flat area on the flank of Xixabangma, a 26,293-foot (8,014-meter) peak on the southern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. The international team, including American, Chinese, Peruvian, Russian and Nepalese members, retrieved the cores during a 10-week, 1997 expedition to the region. The expedition was supported by the National Science Foundation. ‘This is the highest climate record ever retrieved,’ explained Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State […]