To know where you are headed, it helps to know where you've been. That's why researchers who want to better predict climate change are also trying to understand fluctuations from the earth's past.

Scientists claim to have a basic idea of temperatures stretching back 100,000 years by drilling into the ice in Greenland. The extracted "ice cores" contain traces of elements ranging from volcanic ash to ancient plankton, which help researchers mark changes in the climate throughout time.

The latest research by an international team, which scientists from the University of Maine helped author, compared ice records from Greenland with evidence from Antarctica. The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute is active in Antarctica research.

The new findings are significant because scientists now believe they have enough data to predict how climate change has been churning for the past 800,000 years in Greenland.

Photo credit: Cardiff University