A sponge recovered 430 feet deep in the ocean off Exuma Island can do more than scrub your back -- it’s showing what the climate was like on Earth hundreds of years ago.
Scientists used a 600-year-old marine sponge to reconstruct a record of ocean temperature in the North Atlantic.
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It revealed past volcanic activity as well as the current global warming trend from the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere and absorbed by the oceans.
The basketball-sized sponge was discovered by University of Miami researchers who reconstructed the ocean temperature record from the chemical information contained in the sponge’s skeleton.
Since the organisms are slow-growing on the seafloor, some could live as long as 2,000 years, archiving vast information within their limestone skeletons.
Scientists look back in time, knowing the chemical decay rates of uranium and thorium, and correlate environmental conditions in their skeletons.
So what was it like? Researchers show the data recorded in the skeletons agree with the instrumental record from the past 150 years.
The sponge data even picked up on large cooling events associated with natural volcanic activity and correlated with other sources of paleoclimatological information showing temperature variability over the last 600 years.
Temperature reconstructions like this one can go a long way in helping scientists better forecast how conditions may change in the future.