There’s an increasing amount of evidence that the climate has dramatically warmed up over the past century, and now a new study examining 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the Earth is head towards an even more significant rise in heat.

For a new study released Thursday in thejournal Science, a research team from Harvard and Oregon State University looked at the fossils of tiny marine organisms, ice cores and tree rings to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age 11,300 years ago. Scientists learned that the rise in temperatures have been unmatched in at least the past 4,000 years. The study was largely in alignment with other regional studies that looked at the same period of time – the Holocene era.