Jakarta – World climate scientists are doing research on paleoclimate, the study of climate history, to better understand global warming patterns, including climate phenomena on an annual scale, according to researchers from the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Sunday (28/8).
Sri Yudawati Cahyarini, BRIN’s Head of Past Climate and Environmental Research, Center for Climate and Atmospheric Research told Deutsche Welle, data from natural archives from both land and sea are complementary. Therefore, BRIN also researched past climates using stony corals from the Porites genus.
She said, past climate data parameters and current model data can be used to verify and validate climate data, such that climate change predictions can be more accurate. “We have a lot of convincing evidence that the results of the extraction of sea surface temperature (data) from corals can really be stored properly. And this rock is easy to find in the waters of tropical countries like Indonesia,” said Cahyarini, who is conducting research in Bangka Belitung Province.
Researchers can reconstruct sea level data from corals that have lived 100,000 years ago “to know the trend of rising temperatures from past data,” she said. Cahyarini along with a number of researchers from the University of Kiel in Germany and several other researchers from Indonesia and Japan examined medieval rocks that lived in 1100 AD.
Tropical countries such as Indonesia are now also feeling the impact of global warming. The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) noted that the rate of surface temperature in Indonesia has been increasing over the past decade.
According to BMKG records, Indonesia has experienced several of the hottest years in 2016, 2019, and 2020. The increase in temperature in Indonesia over the last 10 years has ranged from 0.6 to 0.8 degrees Celsius. (Hartatik)