Boreholes

By Dustin Billingsley and

Caroline Blythe

What are Boreholes?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a bore as a deep vertical
hole of small diameter bored into the earth to ascertain the nature
of the underlying strata or to obtain water.
Any hole drilled or dug into the subsurface for the purpose of
extracting or investigating the material at that particular point.
Boreholes can be utilized as proxies for paleoclimatology
A proxy is any type of imprint from past climate, whether is be tree
rings, ice cores, fossils, etc. that paleoclimatologists utilize to gather

 Accurate measures of
temperature

Why Dig
Boreholes?

Result in accurate
estimations of
temperatures thousands of
years ago -- time period is
limited by depth bores can
be drilled
Helpful in determining
recent climate before 150
years ago

How Do Boreholes Measure Data?

Borehole data measure past temperatures via the geothermal
temperature gradient
Geothermal temperature gradient (GTG): change in temperature of crust
as it approaches the mantle
Linear warming trends
Rapid or radical changes in temperature cause thermal waves, which
infiltrate into the rock
The rate at which these waves move through the crust determines when they
occurred: 100 years = 150 meters // 1,000 years = 500 meters

5 Centuries
of Borehole
Data

Temperature trends over the past five

centuries reconstructed from borehole
temperatures S. Huang, H.N. Pollack, P. Shen
616 boreholes on 6 continents
479 boreholes showed a net warming
trend
80% of warming occurred in the 19th and
20th centuries
Northern hemisphere: 1.1K // Southern
hemisphere: 0.8K
Of the several proxies these data were
compared to, they displayed the most
drastic change in temperature

Weaknesses of Borehole Data

Thermal properties of the soil and rock of the crust can be altered by factors
such as:
Land use change
Natural vegetative cover change
Variations in winter snowfall
Soil moisture

This means that temperature readings from boreholes may not be entirely
paleologically accurate
Repetition and replication