From Science Daily: Turkey’s Lake Van Provides Precise Insights Into Eurasia’s Climate History.
The bottom of Turkey’s Lake Van is covered by a layer of mud several hundreds of metres deep. For climatologists this unprepossessing slime is worth its weight in gold: summer by summer pollen has been deposited from times long past. From it they can detect right down to a specific year what climatic conditions prevailed at the time of the Neanderthals, for example. These archives may go back as much as half a million years. [continue]
It’s amazing to me that the pollen grains are so sturdy, even after having been washed out of the mud by hyuralonic acid (sorry I can’t spell). Poor little vegetable seeds would have long since disintegrated. Would that our vegetables were as hardy as our weeds.