Melting Glacier Reveals Ancient Tree Stumps

Live Science ^ | 10-30-2007

[blam]

Melting Glacier Reveals Ancient Tree Stumps

LiveScience.com
Tue Oct 30, 2:15 PM ET

Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum, a geologist said today.

Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the stumps revealed the wood was far from fresh—some of it dated back to within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age.

"The stumps were in very good condition sometimes with bark preserved," said Koch, who conducted the work as part of his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Koch will present his results on Oct. 31 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver.

The pristine condition of the wood, he said, can best be explained by the stumps having spent all of the last seven millennia under tens to hundreds of meters of ice. All stumps were still rooted to their original soil and location.

"Thus they really indicate when the glaciers overrode them, and their kill date gives the age of the glacier advance," Koch said. The age of the newly revealed ancient trees also indicates how long the glaciers have covered this region.

The recently warming climate released the stumps from their icy tombs, Koch said.

Koch compared the kill dates of the trees in the southern and northern Coast Mountains of British Columbia and those in the mid- and southern Rocky Mountains in Canada to similar records from the Yukon Territory, the European Alps, New Zealand and South America. He also looked at the age of Oetzi, the prehistoric mummified alpine "Iceman" found at Niederjoch Glacier, and similarly well-preserved wood from glaciers and snowfields in Scandinavia.

The radiocarbon dates seem to be the same around the world, according to Koch. There have been many advances and retreats of these glaciers over the past 7,000 years, but no retreats that have pushed them back so far upstream as to expose these trees.

The age of the tree stumps gives new emphasis to the well-documented before-and-after photographs of retreating glaciers during the past 100 years.

"It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of time," Koch said. "From this work and many other studies looking at forcings of the climate system, one has to turn away from natural ones alone to explain this dramatic change of the past 150 years."

[maine-iac7]

There have been many advances and retreats of these glaciers over the past 7,000 years,

The inconvenience of truths....but they're still trying to spin it as being part of the scam -

Makes no never mind what the truth is.

But when alls said and done, I'll take a swing towards a bit of warming before another Little Ice Age - any day.

These scum bags of the Great Swindle have to be stopped - they're after more mega-fund money to carry out some pseudo science that could have disastrous consequences...

IT'S THE SUN!

I vote we send Gore to the sun, post haste, to fix the problem. At the very least, to Mars, whose polar ice cap is melting at a faster rate than ours.

And why are they flocking to the Arctic, where there IS a cyclical melt going on while now ignoring the Antarctic, where there's a new freeze underway?

Rhetorical question -

[milwguy]

Actually 7000 years ago it was global cooling, because the glaciers were advancing. On the other hand, before they were advancing, that part of Canada was MUCH warmer than it is now, thus allowing the trees to grow. The evidence of forest growth in far northern reaches is proof that temperatures in the not too distant past were warmer than today, and as far as I know, the ice agers around then didn’t drive cars to hunt the mammoth and other game.
........As for being proof of global warming, ask why sea ice in antarctica was at RECORD levels this past summer (the southern hemispheres winter)? One could take that fact as evidence of global cooling.

[Cyman]

Now if we could only get AlGore to sit on it we would have a story

[Sgt_Schultze]

Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum,

The evidence of tree stumps invalidates the accuracy of recorded history (which for GW supplicants goes back over 150 years!).

[Red Badger]

....where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum.....

Obviously not...............

[DungeonMaster]

The earth is 6000 years old and before the big flood the atmosphere was much thicker making it like a giant terrarium. So yes, it was much warmer at the poles.

[SittinYonder]

Al Gore doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.

Keep talking like that, and you're going to lose your government research grants!

[Tatze]

...where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum...

Well, obviously NOT a historic minimum, if the ice wasnt there back then to have trees growing!

It really is staggering that they still expect us to buy this crap!

[Deaf Smith]

If this is a glacier and not a ice sheet, why weren’t the tree stumps up rooted & ground up? Glaciers flow.

[colorado tanker]

Now if we could only get AlGore to sit on it we would have a story

Well, Al does act like he has a stump up his . . . .

[CharlesWayneCT]

Yes, and it was our fault. Fortunately, Al Gore was there to save us, ushering in the beneficial ice age that killed every living thing in it’s path, and thus preserved for our children and children’s children these wonderful tree stumps.

[PeterPrinciple]

Now wait a minute. If they are stumps that means someone cut them off, that means it is Bushes fault.

[PeterPrinciple]

Now wait a minute. If they are stumps that means someone cut them off, that means it is Bushes fault.

[Arrowhead1952]

There have been many advances and retreats of these glaciers over the past 7,000 years, but no retreats that have pushed them back so far upstream as to expose these trees.

How is Algore going to explain why trees were growing in that area IF the temperatures were warm enough to have plants growing there?

< moonbat mode on>

Halliburton must have planted those stumps during the night.

< /moonbat mode>

[Badeye]

Yes, its true. Apparently ancient civilizations from 7,000 years ago also used Metro Bus’s firing up diesel engines.....

[shankbear]

These were rare and endangered Ice trees. Now they are being killed off by global warming. Shame, shame.....

[Jewels1091]

gee, that would mean there wasn’t a glazer on top of it at one time????? Would that mean we had global COOLING????

[beethovenfan]

Al Gore’s ancestors????

[RobRoy]

>>”It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of time,” Koch said. “From this work and many other studies looking at forcings of the climate system, one has to turn away from natural ones alone to explain this dramatic change of the past 150 years.”<<

I thought it was 7,000 years, not 150.

7,000 is quite a while.

[Perchant]

And not just warm enough to grow some grasses on permafrost, warm enough to grow large trees. We are still deep in an ice age.