Geologists like Larry Anovitz may have a new weapon of choice for reconstructing ancient climates. Obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass, has been used for making tools and weapons since the Stone Age, but a team led by Anovitz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has discovered another use for this sharp and shiny rock. While obsidian has proven difficult to date, Anovitz and colleagues from ORNL and the University of Tennessee have devised a way to exploit a characteristic that has previously been viewed as a liability to use obsidian as a measure of prehistoric climate change. For their study, Anovitz, Dave Cole, Mostafa Fayek, Mike Elam and Lee Riciputi looked at obsidian samples dated from the 6th through 16th centuries from the Chalco site in the Basin of Mexico. The results show that the technique may be useful as an alternate method for determining information on climate data for the last 15 centuries. The work, which is funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences and by the National Science Foundation, is published in the current issue of the Geological Society of America's GEOLOGY.
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