Posted on 12/04/2004 3:48:39 PM PST by Pharmboy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming (news - web sites) could lead to a big chill in the North Atlantic, at least if history is anything to go by, researchers reported on Friday.
They published evidence to support a popular theory that rising temperatures caused a big melt of polar ice 8,200 years ago, causing a freshwater flood into the salty North Atlantic.
This would have changed the flow of the balmy Gulf Stream and in just a few years, average temperatures plummeted, ushering in a deep freeze that lasted a century or more, researchers have proposed.
Writing in the Dec. 11 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Torbjorn Tornqvist, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says he has evidence that this happened.
"Few would argue it's the most dramatic climate change in the last 10,000 years," Tornqvist said in a statement. "We're now able to show the first sea-level record that corresponds to that event."
Tornqvist and some graduate students found the evidence along the Gulf of Mexico off the southern U.S. coast.
They found peat deposits that would have been formed under rising sea levels. Working with researchers in the Netherlands, they dated the material to 8,200 years ago.
Their composition suggested they were made when a saltwater marsh was abruptly flooded and turned into a lagoon.
"Climatologists urgently need this type of information to run their climate models in order to understand the conditions that can produce such an abrupt climate change," Tonrqvist said.
Cool!
Any climate change can be blamed on Global Warming now.
Yeh, it is all myth.
So, this means that everyone has been right all along (or wrong all along)...I'm so confused.
I just watched an old Perry Mason episode where the crime took place right over this peat field; the episode was 40 years old.
Global warming does it all.Than some wonder why many of us don`t believe one bit of this socialist ploy to destroy the US economy.
You just got a hearty LOL out of me (and I was depressed after the drubbing Army took from the swabbies). So thanks!
"They published evidence to support a popular theory that rising temperatures caused a big melt of polar ice 8,200 years ago, causing a freshwater flood into the salty North Atlantic."
I don't understand this. Take a glass, fill it with ice cubes, then fill it with water. As the ice melts, the level of water in the glass does not suddenly start to overflow all over your countertop, does it?
The Polar Ice Caps have already displaced all the mass they're going to. If they melted, the water levels should remain the same.
Or did I skip that physics lesson to smoke dope out in the High School parking lot that day? I can't remember, LOL!
Evidence of global warming and global cooling are easy to find in Greenland. A Norse farm is being exposed by the retreating ice, which was covered by the advancing ice 500 years ago. The area was settled and farmed during a warm era several hundred years before, and its settlers died out as colder climate brought insufficient harvests.
So what did they find off the Gulf Coast?
"Evidence of global warming and global cooling are easy to find in Greenland. A Norse farm is being exposed by the retreating ice, which was covered by the advancing ice 500 years ago. The area was settled and farmed during a warm era several hundred years before, and its settlers died out as colder climate brought insufficient harvests"
( ;D
It's got nothing to do with what you smoked in High School and everything to do with the simplistic misinformation you received there.
That's true of the North pole but the argument goes that much of the ice mass in Antarctica is on land.
bump
Must have been caused by all those early SUVs and industrial activity...
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