A team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur and Deccan College PGRI Pune has developed a new technique that can obtain data about past seasonal changes in sea surface temperature from calcium carbonate continuously secreted by biological organisms such as fish. These carbonates are concentrated in the ear bones of fish, known as otoliths.
The study, published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, was funded by the Infosys Foundation, IIT-Kharagpur said in a statement on Sunday. This method can be used in any type of biological organism and has wide potential in climate studies.
Instrumental climate records are not available everywhere. If one wants to know, for example, how the temperature changed on a weekly to monthly scale over the past several years in the deep tiger-infested creeks of the Sundarbans delta, one can find a live fish that has recorded past climates in the otolith, The statement said. The main problem with modeling past climates is the lack of seasonal data, mainly because the geological or archaeological record does not provide that kind of solution.
We have employed a new technique where otoliths of a few millimeters in size are analyzed by a carbon-dioxide laser to measure their oxygen isotopic compositions at a few micron scale intervals. “The oxygen isotopes in these otoliths depend on the temperature of the water in which the fish grew and therefore record continuous snapshots of past temperatures during their lifetimes of a few years,” said principal investigator Professor Anindya Sarkar, Department of Geology and Geophysics. IIT-Kharagpur.
Dr Aarti Deshpande Mukherjee from Deccan College, who collaborated on this research, said: We are studying fish otoliths dating back 5,000 years from Indus Valley sites to assess what drives the growth and decline of this magnificent civilization through time. How was it affected?
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