[font face=Serif]PAGES’ Ocean2k Working Group
[font color="red"]Press release 13 August 2015 Embargoed until 17 August 2015, 4pm British Summer Time
(11 am US EDT / 5pm Europe CEST / 1am 18/08/2015 Australia AEST)[/font]
[font size=5]Frequent volcanic eruptions likely cause of long-term ocean cooling[/font]

[font size=3]An international team of researchers found an 1800 year-long cooling trend in the surface layer of the Earth’s oceans, and that volcanic eruptions were the likely cause of this cooling from 801 to 1800 AD. The coolest temperatures were during the Little Ice Age - that was before man-made global warming erased the trend in the 1800s.

The research reported today by the Past Global Changes’ (PAGES) Ocean2k Working Group in Nature Geoscience indicated that it was likely an increase in the number and size of these eruptions in recent centuries that was the prime cause of the cooling.

…

In an additional finding the researchers discovered that a period of cooling reported on land around the 16th to 18th centuries, known as the Little Ice Age, coincided with ocean cooling, adding weight to the theory that this event was a global phenomenon.

The scientists reached their conclusions by combining, for the first time, 57 previously published and publicly available marine surface temperature reconstructions from across all of the world’s oceans, from near-polar to tropical regions. Data were compiled within 200-year brackets to observe long-term trends.

…[/font][/font]