Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/30/2009 4:05:01 AM PDT by saganite
Fossilised corals from tropical Tahiti show that the behaviour of ice sheets is much more volatile and dynamic than previously thought, a team led by Oxford University scientists has found.
Analysis of the corals suggests that ice sheets can change rapidly over just hundreds of years – events associated with sea level rises of several metres over the same period. It also shows that a natural warming mechanism thought to be responsible for ending ice ages does not fit the timing of the end of the penultimate ice age, around 137,000 years ago.
A report of the research appears online in the journal Science on April 23.
"It’s amazing just how rapidly these ‘melting’ – or ‘deglaciation’ – events occurred and how enormous the volumes of ice involved were," said Dr Alex Thomas, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, lead author of the paper. "In the case of deglaciation after the penultimate ice age, before 137,000 years ago, we’re talking about ice sheets – that covered most of the USA and Canada and were up to five kilometres thick – simply vanishing."
snip
Dr Thomas said: "People had assumed that because this natural warming mechanism matched the timing of deglaciation ending the last ice age (around 21,000 years ago) that it would be responsible for the one before that. What we have shown is that this was not the case. We are starting to understand that recent observations of changes in ice sheets have not prepared us for just how rapidly the covering of ice across the Earth can fluctuate and that, as yet, we have not identified all the natural phenomena which drive deglaciation."
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
ping
Maybe it’s because we don’t understand very much about the earth, the planets and the universe... I’m just saying.
Another tip, computer models are not science, they are just mathematical gibberish, easily turned into GIGO fests.
I guess there weren’t enough regulations on cars & factories back then.
LLS
In other words, what we thought we knew, we now know we didn’t and what we now know makes us believe that we, someday may know more, but we still do not know.
Maybe the amnswer really is 42.....
Maybe it’s because we don’t understand very much about the earth, the planets and the universe... I’m just saying.
Another tip, computer models are not science, they are just mathematical gibberish, easily turned into GIGO fests.
Agree 100%
just remember, the question turned out to be “what is six times eight”?
There’s a lot about life, the universe, and everything in that question.
Here’s a related article you should add to your ping list.
“Arctic Ice Twice as Thick as Thought”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2241045/posts
So the Milankovitch theory does not explain 100% of climate change. Hmm. But now we don’t know what influenced the last ice age.
We don’t even understand what influences the ice caps today. There was another post this morning reporting that the Arctic Sea Ice is thicker than expected. Recent measurements put the new ice (2 years old) there at 4 meters thick in places where 2 meters was expected.
I saw a climate temperature plot that went back several million years. As Earth cooled, suddenly there were these big oscillations (ice age cycles) and the author said, well, this all started when the poles iced over as Earth cooled. It made a big oscillator, but we don’t know why it oscillates.
Paraphrased, but I think I got the gist.
I do believe they were scared out of their wits.
Apparantly they were in the party of climatologists who refuse to pay attention to long term temperature deviations. They continued to believe it was getting warmer and warmer while the numbers showed that it was actually getting colder and colder.
Bump for later reading.
Just so!
It’s a bit confusing but the report today about the ice being 4 meters thick in some places comes from a German aircraft survey, not from the Brit team starving to death on the ground. In fact the last I read about those guys is that none of their equipment worked and they were on half rations because a resupply plane couldn’t reach them-—because of the weather. Typical Brit undertaking. “We’ll muddle through” seems to be a national personality trait.
The articles have all been rather silent about why they were out of food. The "resupply" trip wasn't, as I read it, part of a plan but something they had to do because "something happened".
I think it's the blizzard that's the difficulty here. They expected gentle tropical breezes or something. Just think of this as a total "moonbat" sort of thing.
I had to look up the name of that expedition and there’s been no news in the past 2 weeks but according to these links they are still taking readings with an ice core drill. The second link I provided has a short segment on the expedition but the GW related material above it is frightening. It appears Brits are ready to ban speech challenging global warming, even some talk of making it a crime not to have your house adequately insulated as well as attacks by Green protesters on coal plants. Scary stuff.
Explorers on the rocks
Thanks to sharp-eyed observers on the US science blog Watts Up With That, we see how Pen Hadow’s much-touted Catlin expedition to measure that disappearing Arctic ice is degenerating into farce. Despite claims by Prince Charles and a galaxy of warmist sponsors that Hadow and his two colleagues would provide “vital scientific data” to show how the ice could soon vanish, the loss of equipment through intense cold has reduced them to measuring the ice with an old feet-and-inches tape measure, Last week their website had to post an apology for providing misleading data, It seems increasingly unlikely the gallant trio will reach the Pole, despite rather more efficient satellite data confirming that the ice is considerably thicker than last year.
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