ISBN: | 978-5-5118-4904-1 |
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Marine isotope stages (MIS), marine oxygen-isotope stages, or oxygen isotope stages (OIS), are alternating warm and cool periods in the Earth`s paleoclimate, deduced from oxygen isotope data reflecting changes in temperature derived from data from deep sea core samples. The data is derived from pollen and foraminifera (plankton) remains in drilled marine sediment cores, sapropels, and other data that reflect historic climate; these are called proxies. The MIS timescale was developed from the pioneering work of Cesare Emiliani in the 1950s, and is now widely used in archaeology and other fields to express dating in the Quaternary period (the last 2.6 million years), as well as providing the fullest and best data for that period for paleoclimatology or the study of the early climate of the earth, representing "the standard to which we correlate other Quaternary climate records". Emiliani`s work in turn depended on Harold Urey`s prediction in a paper of 1947 that the ratio between oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 isotopes in calcite, the main chemical component of the shells and other hard parts of a wide range of marine organisms, should vary depending on the prevailing water temperature in which the calcite was formed.