Editing Paleoclimatology (section)

== The Concept of Climate Proxies ==

A climate proxy is a stand-in for a direct measurement. In the natural world, the growth rates of organisms, the chemical composition of shells, and the physical deposition of snow or sediment are heavily influenced by the environmental conditions present at the time they formed. If these materials are preserved in a sequential, chronologically ordered manner, researchers can extract them, analyze their properties, and work backward to infer the environmental conditions that created them.

Because no single proxy provides a perfect record of the global climate, researchers must cross-date and synthesize multiple independent proxy records from around the world to build a robust, comprehensive picture of Earth's climatic past.