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Source: University of Chicago Date: February 5, 2007 Ancient Rocks Show How Young Earth Avoided Becoming Giant Snowball Science Daily — A greenhouse gas that has become the bane of modern society may have saved Earth from completely freezing over early in the planet's history, according to the first detailed laboratory analysis of the world's oldest sedimentary rocks. A rock from a banded iron formation in northern Quebec, Canada. The bands vary in thickness from approximately 10 microns (less than the width of a human hair), to 10 meters (30 feet). This sample is measures a few inches across. At...

Bacteria froze the Earth, researchers say By Michael Kanellos http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/Bacteria+froze+the+Earth%2C+researchers+say/2100-7337_3-5815965.html Story last modified Tue Aug 02 17:15:00 PDT 2005 Humans apparently aren't the first species to change the climate of the planet. Bacteria living 2.3 billion years ago could have plunged the planet into deep freeze, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim in a new report. Several graduate students, along with supervising professor Joe Kirschvink, have released a paper presenting their explanation of what caused "Snowball Earth," a periodic deep freeze of Earth's atmosphere that has been theorized for years. The Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion...

Canadian geologists say they can shed light on how a vast lake, trapped under the ice sheet that once smothered much of North America, drained into the sea, an event that cooled Earth's climate for hundreds of years. During the last ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered most of Canada and parts of the northern United States with a frozen crust that in some places was three kilometres (two miles) thick. As the temperature gradually rose some 10,000 years ago, the ice receded, gouging out the hollows that would be called the Great Lakes. Beneath the ice's thinning...

Geoscientists in Scotland say they have evidence to disprove the controversial "Snowball Earth" theory - the idea that the planet was completely encased in ice just over 600 million years ago.We are claiming that in reality there was not a totally frozen snowball Earth and that even during the coldest conditions large regions remained ice-free -- Dr Dan CondonThe team, from the University of St Andrews, has published its findings in the scientific journal Geology, after studying rocks in the west of Scotland, Ireland, Namibia and California. Drs Dan Condon, Tony Prave and Doug Benn say they have found evidence...

Ice Ages Blamed on Tilted Earth By Michael Schirber LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 30 March 2005 In the past million years, the Earth experienced a major ice age about every 100,000 years. Scientists have several theories to explain this glacial cycle, but new research suggests the primary driving force is all in how the planet leans. The Earth’s rotation axis is not perpendicular to the plane in which it orbits the Sun. It's offset by 23.5 degrees. This tilt, or obliquity, explains why we have seasons and why places above the Arctic Circle have 24-hour darkness in winter and constant...

Ice Age climate records from an Arizona stalagmite link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research. The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson. "It's a new picture of the climate in the Southwest during the last Ice Age," said Cole, a UA professor of geosciences. "When it was cold in Greenland, it was wet here, and when it was warm in Greenland, it was...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

Fruits in my fruit bowl tend to rot into a mulchy mess after a couple of weeks. Fruits that are chilled in permanent Siberian ice fare rather better. After more than 30,000 years, and some care from Russian scientists, some ancient fruits have produced this delicate white flower. These regenerated plants, rising like wintry Phoenixes from the Russian ice, are still viable. They produce their own seeds and, after a 30,000-year hiatus, can continue their family line. The plant owes its miraculous resurrection to a team of scientists led by David Gilichinsky, and an enterprising ground squirrel. Back in the...

MOSCOW (AP) -- It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way for the revival of other species. The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms, said the Russian researchers,...

In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past. Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again — and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated if ongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say. Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger...

The rise of the Appalachian Mountains seems to have triggered an ice age 450 million years ago by sucking CO2 from the atmosphere. Researchers report evidence that minerals from the mountain range washed into the oceans just before the cold snap, carrying atmospheric carbon dioxide with them. The result clarifies a long standing paradox in the historical relationship between CO2 and climate, experts say. At the start of the so-called Ordovician ice age, about 450 million years ago, the planet went from a state of greenhouse warmth to one of glacial cold, culminating in mass extinctions of ocean life. This...

From the file of “Things that would really be catastrophic”. Did a meteor have a role in a major shift in Earth’s Climate?The start of the Quaternary period (2.588 million years ago, where the Pliocene became Pleistocene) coincides with evidence of a mega tsunami in the South Pacific.The Eltanin Meteor fell into the South Pacific 2.5 million years ago setting off a (likely) tsunami that was hundreds of meters high and theoretically pushed mass material into the atmosphere which may have contributed to the cooling the globe had already started on. This meteor was hard to detect because it hit...

Source: University of Chicago Date: July 20, 2007 Ice Age Survivors Found In Iceland Science Daily — Many scientists believe that the ice ages exterminated all life on land and in freshwater in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere, especially on ocean islands such as Iceland. Crymostygius thingvallensis, the only species in a recently described family of groundwater amphipods Crymostygidae. (Credit: photograph by Thorkell Heidarsson) Scientists at Holar University College and the University of Iceland have challenged that belief, at least when looking at groundwater animals. They have discovered two species of groundwater amphipods in Iceland that are the only...

Scientists have long tried to figure out what causes the ebb and flow of ice ages. New data suggests a novel explanation for why the mile-thick blankets of ice retreat so quickly: They become too heavy. For the last 900,000 years, mile-thick ice sheets have waxed and waned in the Northern Hemisphere with remarkable regularity – building over periods of about 100,000 years and retreating in the space of only a few thousand years, only to repeat the cycle. Now, a team of scientists from Japan, the US, and Switzerland suggests that the North American continent is the breeding ground...

The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge. For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world's deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years... In this case, the water moved rapidly through bedrock gorge, carving away the base...

Imagine swimming in an underwater primeval forest that nature has preserved for over 50,000 years. Now you can if you are willing to dive 60 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, 10 miles offshore of Alabama. Experts believe 2005's Hurricane Katrina unveiled what had been buried under ocean sediment for centuries. And it took some curious fishermen to discover it by questioning why there so many fishing congregating in one area. The discovery was made in 2012 but only recently became public knowledge. The find was confirmed when a dive team and experts from Louisiana State University...

(Phys.org)—When a huge meteor collided with Earth about 2.5 million years ago in the southern Pacific Ocean it not only likely generated a massive tsunami but also may have plunged the world into the Ice Ages, a new study suggests. A team of Australian researchers says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometres across - crashed into deep water, most scientists have not adequately considered either its potential for immediate catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet's climate system. "This is the only known deep-ocean impact...

An impact event occurred at 2.15±0.5 Ma in the Bellingshausen Sea. It littered the oceanic floor with asteroidal debris. This debris is found within the Eltanin Impact Layer. Although the impact layer was known, the crater had yet to be discovered. We have found a possible source crater at 53.7S,90.1W under 5000 meters of water. The crater is 132±5km in diameter, much larger than the previously proposed size of 24 to 80 km.

Science & Technology 9/16/02 Defrosting the past Ancient human and animal remains are melting out of glaciers, a bounty of a warming world BY ALEX MARKELS As he hiked near Colorado's Continental Divide in the summer of 2001, Ed Knapp noticed a strange shape jutting from a melting ice field at 13,000 feet. "It looked like a bison skull," the building contractor and amateur archaeologist recalls. "I thought, 'That's strange. Bison don't live this high up.' " Knapp brought the skull to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where scientists last month announced that it was indeed from a...

PARIS (AFP) – Global warming may wipe out three-quarters of Europe's alpine glaciers by 2100 and hike sea levels by four metres (13 feet) by the year 3000 through melting the West Antarctic icesheet, two studies published on Sunday said. The research places the spotlight on two of the least understood aspects of climate change: how, when and where warming will affect glaciers on which many millions depend for their water, and the problems faced by generations in the far distant future. The glacier study predicts that mountain glaciers and icecaps will shrink by 15-27 percent in volume terms on...