Climate history

Paleoclimatology (British spelling, palaeoclimatology) is the scientific study of climates predating the invention of meteorological instruments, when no direct, artificial measurement data were available. As instrumental records only span a tiny part of Earth's history, the reconstruction of ancient climate is important to understand natural variation and the evolution of the current climate.

apparent mystery that the early Earth seems to have had liquid water, even though the young Sun was less bright, thus presumably completely freezing the Earth

climatic period

popular science book by Elizabeth Kolbert

Difference of a temperature from a reference value

thumb|222px|The nature of sediments can vary in a cyclic fashion, and these cycles can be displayed in the sedimentary record - here visible in the colouration and resistance of strata thumb|Milankovitch variations, solar forcing, and glacial cycles. Image by Robert A. Rohde, under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Cyclostratigraphy is a subdiscipline of stratigraphy that studies astronomically forced climate cycles within sedimentary successions.