Thanks BenLurkin. And I'm making this the weekly digest ping.
Posted on 01/29/2021 7:31:56 PM PST by BenLurkin
Large parts of the Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago, evidenced by prehistoric engravings in the desert of giraffes, crocodiles and a stone-age cave painting of humans swimming. Recently, more detailed insights were gained from a combination of sediment cores extracted from the Mediterranean Sea and results from climate computer modeling, which an international research team, including University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanography researcher Tobias Friedrich, examined for the first time.
The layers of the seafloor tell the story of major environmental changes in North Africa over the past 160,000 years.
Analyzing such sediments would help to better understand the timing and circumstances for the reactivation of these rivers and provide a climatic context for the development of past human populations.
Using a method called piston coring, the scientists pressed giant cylinders into the seafloor and were able to recover nearly 30-foot long columns of marine mud.
The layers of mud contain sediment particles and plant remains transported from the nearby African continent, as well as shells of microorganisms that grew in seawater, telling the story of climatic changes in the past.
From previous work, it was already known that several rivers episodically flowed across the region, which today is one of the driest areas on Earth. The team's unprecedented reconstruction continuously covers the last 160,000 years. It offers a comprehensive picture of when and why there was sufficient rainfall in the Central Sahara to reactivate these rivers.
The fertile periods generally lasted five thousand years and humidity spread over North Africa up to the Mediterranean coast. For the people of that time, this resulted in drastic changes in living conditions, which probably led to large migratory movements in North Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Unpossible! The climate was stable until the SUV came along.
If only the Egyptians didn’t insist on driving those awful, gas-guzzling SUVs.
uh, wait a minute......
Man! You only beat me because I have trouble typing on my phone’s tiny keypad.
ping
Fascinating but that is not a ‘painting’ of a giraffe. What is wrong with that writer?
Every scientific endeavor has to include at least one bow to the god of manmade climate change. This article, thankfully, saves it for last.
I enjoyed the nice photo of an amazing petroglyph- an ancient detailed engraving of a giraffe.
You’re right that’s not a painting, it’s a petroglyph, a rock carving.
No mention of the whale bones reported to have been found in the Sahara.
You don’t say! Climates change? I don’t believe it!
It’s always been static until SUV’s destroyed Mother Earth. We only have 9 years left...
North Africa was the Roman Empire’s breadbasket. It isn’t anybody’s breadbasket now. The climate does change. People adapt.
Ghetto people and wards of the State have no incentive to move:-)
The Roman farming areas get plenty of rain, even today. The Med. coasts of Algeria and Morocco. Agriculture could do very well, properly managed. Israel does very well in much drier conditions.
The Roman farming areas get plenty of rain, even today. The Med. coasts of Algeria and Morocco. Agriculture could do very well, properly managed
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I don’t know about the amount of rainfall at present vs 2500 years ago, but the land is arid, not desert. However, during the muscleman conquest of North Africa, they salted much of the land and used vast herds of goats to strip all vegetation. How much has recovered?
Libya, under Qaddafi, was beginning to change things for the better by building The Great Man-Made River to irrigate vast areas of the country (would have been the largest irrigation project ever built anywhere); but Hillary’s war destroyed the project and now warlords fight over the spoils.
Seawater desalination prices have been falling. In another decade or so these prices will fall low enough for desert farming. then the world will change.
Thanks BL. I have an article on deck about 3rd c drought in Roman Egypt, attributed to an unidentified tropical volcano. I wasn’t too impressed. The Crisis of the Third Century was almost over by the time of the supposed event.
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3717035/posts
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3692456/posts
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1888955/posts
https://www.freerepublic.com/tag/sahara/index
Thanks BenLurkin. And I'm making this the weekly digest ping.
What I keep trying to figure out here is did this cave man artist cut out all those little spots on the giraffe?! Seems he had too... being they’re not elsewhere on that rock, but they look so natural. Or were they there an he felt they looked like a giraffe and just outlined them as the giraffe?
The reason the Anasazi Indians are gone is believed to be climate change, the region dried up.
If we pay more taxes to those that are our betters then the planets axis will stop swinging about....
FTA: Now researchers at MIT have analyzed dust deposited off the coast of west Africa over the last 240,000 years, and found that the Sahara, and North Africa in general, has swung between wet and dry climates every 20,000 years. They say that this climatic pendulum is mainly driven by changes to the Earth’s axis as the planet orbits the sun, which in turn affect the distribution of sunlight between seasons—every 20,000 years, the Earth swings from more sunlight in summer to less, and back again.
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