Continents reconfigure, oceans shift, and ice sheets thicken and thaw, but for the past 95 million years Earth’s engine for distributing ocean heat has remained remarkably consistent. That’s one of the findings of a new, Yale-led study that tracks the evolution of Earth’s climate system with a novel approach for calculating the temperature difference between oceans in higher and lower latitudes. Using marine specimens from the ancient fossil record, the research offers a new way to gauge the accuracy of climate models. The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There are so many interlocking parts to climate science. What we’re doing here is trying to improve the foundations by testing some of the underlying dynamics of climate models that are used to predict future climate,” said Daniel Gaskell, a doctoral student at Yale and first author of the study. Gaskell works in the lab of Pincelli Hull, a Yale assistant professor of Earth & planetary sciences, and co-author of the new study.

Additional co-authors of the study were former Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellow Charlotte O’Brien, who is now at University College London, Matthew Huber of Purdue University, Gordon Inglis of the University of Southampton, and R. Paul Acosta and Christopher Poulsen of the University of Michigan. For more information, please click here for an article published by Yale News.