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Posted on 11/01/2007 10:28:47 AM PDT by 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."
Hmm. Tree stumps.
Looks like it used to be warmer around those parts. I wonder who was to blame.
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historical accident. This time it’s on purpose ;)
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Thanks Blam. |
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Obviously only if "historic" is defined as within the past 7000 years -- a concept which would fly with Biblical creationists, but they aren't exactly the core of the global warming alarmism movement.
What is the authoritative source of this graph showing temperature swings, dust and CO2 concentrations?
“How is Algore going to explain why trees were growing in that area IF the temperatures were warm enough to have plants growing there?”
LOL! Now you’ve done it! That rumble in the Earth you feel is a giant robotic version of Al Gore coming for you!
Obviously it’s Bush’s fault, er, Haliburton, er, Big Oil, er, mean spirited Republicans...
Vostok ice core data.
Just do a google search. There are tons of graphs for it.
This CAN’T be possible!!!
Eerybody KNOWS the world is warmer than it ever had been!!
How could there POSSIBLY have been trees growing there?
I guess this is only a question the Inventor of the Internet can answer (Algore, are you out there?)
Well, I have never heard of trees growing inside ice. If the stumps are there, they had to be alive long ago and the glacier covered them later. Algore's gorebull warming spiel is getting a shakedown.
Nah, it was Fred Flintstone and his hot feet what with having to use them for motion and brakes.
“It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of time,” Koch said.
Right. In the MILLIONS of years of earth’s history we are experiencing an “unprecedented” change. He knows. He checked every one of those millions of years!
But if all they found were stumps then someone must have cut then down and probably burned all the wood turning it into carbon dioxide and brought on the ice age.
Were they really burning oil back then and also using aerosol cans? That’s what I understand is the reason for global warming.
Perhaps a dumb question here...but could it be....that the earth really isn’t “heating up” but returning to its natural temperature?
Does anyone out there have a copy of God’s rule book on natural temperatures? We need a honest referee to view the rules in the book and make a on-the-field reading for us.
Why? Natural disasters and natural changes happen quickly. In one seconds-only earthquake, you can rip the land from one state to the other. In a fast-moving hurricane, you can rip cities to shreds. A sudden avalanche can completely reshape geologic formations. A meteor blasting in from outer space can suddenly fell an entire forest. We've all seen the weather change dramatically in a short matter of time. Nature isn't just the drip-drip-drip over time that gradually changes the earth, it is also the fast moving disasters that change the earth.
Algore rarely speaks at all during cool months. He's got six months to come up with an answer and by then everyone will have forgotten about the tree stumps.
It was just summer up there, too. That's why the provers went there and not the Antarctic.
Is Al Gore really dumber than a stump?
Yes, apparently he is...
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