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For more than 2 million years our earth has cycled in and out of Ice Ages, accompanied by massive ice sheets accumulating over polar landmasses and a cold, desert-like global climate. Although the tropics during the Ice Age were still tropical, the temperate regions and sub-tropical regions were markedly different than they are today. There is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations during this time. Historically, glacial cycles of about 100,000 years are interupted by brief warm interglacial periods-- like the one we enjoy today. Changes in both temperatures and CO2 are considerable and generally synchronized, according to...

In our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.They have a very good reason. Actual...

THE last ice age 13,000 years ago took hold in just one year, more than ten times quicker than previously believed, scientists have warned. Rather than a gradual cooling over a decade, the ice age plunged Europe into the deep freeze, German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam said. Cold, stormy conditions caused by an abrupt shift in atmospheric circulation froze the continent almost instantly during the Younger Dryas less than 13,000 years ago – a very recent period on a geological scale. The new findings will add to fears of a serious risk of this happening again in the...

An archaeological discovery from this past September could put the earliest inhabitation in Canada at around 13,800 years ago, reported CBC News. Right now it's all on sonar images captured by an underwater robotic vehicle. Archaeologist Quentin Mackie from the University of Victoria (UVIC) and his team returned from a research trip to the Haida Gwaii archipelago in August, where they used an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to scan the sea floor in search of evidence of ancient human inhabitation. His team has been looking for proof of the earliest human presence in North America for decades, and what they...

Scientists based in Germany and Norway today published new results about a geophysical theory known as true polar wander. That is a drifting of Earth's solid exterior -- an actual change in latitude for some land masses -- relative to our planet's rotation axis. These scientists used hotspots in Earth's mantle as part of a computer model, which they say is accurate for the past 120 million years, to identify four possible instances of true polar wander in the past. And, they say, true polar wander is happening now... The scientists -- including Pavel V. Doubrovine and Trond H. Torsvik...

New Haven, Conn. — The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth’s surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth’s landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth’s evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly...

American boffins say they have discovered evidence that almost the entire world was covered in sea ice and glaciers at certain points in the remote past, during so-called "snowball Earth" periods where the polar ice sheets met at the Equator. It were grim in the old days. Geologists probing conditions seen in the ancient world have long considered that there was a cold spell known as the Sturtian Glaciation about 716 million years ago. However there has been disagreement in boffinry circles as to just how severe this glaciation was. Now, researchers from Harvard uni in the States, funded by...

PASADENA, Calif.— Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things will disappear. Or maybe not quite so soon, say researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who have come up with a mechanism that doubles the future lifespan of the biosphere—while also increasing the chance that advanced life will be found elsewhere in the universe. A paper describing their...

A 250-million-year shutdown of volcanic activity which is thought to have occurred early in Earth's history may be what turned the planet into a glacier-covered snowball. It could also have helped give rise to our oxygen-rich atmosphere. Previous studies have noted that very little volcanic material has been dated to between 2.45 and 2.2 billion years ago, but it was widely assumed the gap would vanish as more samples were dated. Now an analysis of thousands of zircon minerals collected from all seven continents indicates that the gap may be real after all. Zircons provide a record of past volcanic...

WASHINGTON: A new research has found that prehistoric global cooling that started in Antarctica about 35.5 million years ago, was caused by a sharp drop in the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Even after the continent of Antarctica had drifted to near its present location, its climate was subtropical. Then, 35.5 million years ago, ice formed on Antarctica in about 100,000 years, which is an "overnight" shift in geological terms. "Our studies show that just over thirty-five million years ago, 'poof,' there was an ice sheet where there had been subtropical temperatures before," said Matthew Huber, assistant professor of earth and...

Enlarge ImageMolecular fingerprints. Sedimentary rock formations in Oman, like this one, contain chemical evidence of the planet's first animals, which appeared at least 635 million years ago. Credit: David Fike, Nature Where did all the animals come from? The fossil record is virtually animal-free up until the Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago, and then--boom--thousands of critters of all shapes and sizes show up. The mystery has plagued scientists for more than a century and a half, beginning with Charles Darwin. Now, with a brilliant bit of detective work, researchers have located our missing ancestors. The problem with the...

Guest post by Frank Lansner, civil engineer, biotechnology. (Note from Anthony - English is not Frank’s primary language, I have made some small adjustments for readability, however they may be a few passages that need clarification. Frank will be happy to clarify in comments) It is generally accepted that CO2 is lagging temperature in Antarctic graphs. To dig further into this subject therefore might seem a waste of time. But the reality is, that these graphs are still widely used as an argument for the global warming hypothesis. But can the CO2-hypothesis be supported in any way using the data...

The climate orthodoxy of carbon hysteria has never understood the intricacies of causative interaction in Earth's climate. Led by fanatics such as James Hansen and Al Gore, the orthodoxy decided early on to assign responsibility for "climate change" to human generated CO2. Orthodoxers reduced the complex system of climate to a single parameter--CO2--to make their job easier. Unfortunately, the orthodoxy failed to recruit (bribe and cudgel) large numbers of mathematically and scientifically trained men and women who remain curious about the underlying complexity of climate. Curious enough to continue studying climate as a multi-causative system. The distribution of sunlight, rather...

The findings, from two separate research groups... say the process of carbon sequestration is already underway. Even so, the new carbon sink is unlikely to make a significant dent in the huge amounts of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by industrial activities... Phytoplankton produce chlorophyll to obtain energy from the sun and assimilate CO2, and so increased phytoplankton productivity would remove more carbon from the atmosphere... From one year to the next, the phytoplankton grew more in areas where the ice had disappeared: less ice meant more open water for longer, allowing the plankton to soak up more energy from...

Rapid changes in the churning movement of Earth's liquid outer core are weakening the magnetic field in some regions of the planet's surface, a new study says. "What is so surprising is that rapid, almost sudden, changes take place in the Earth's magnetic field," said study co-author Nils Olsen, a geophysicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. The findings suggest similarly quick changes are simultaneously occurring in the liquid metal, 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) below the surface, he said. The swirling flow of molten iron and nickel around Earth's solid center triggers an electrical current, which generates the...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Even in geology, it's not often a date gets revised by 500 million years. But University of Florida geologists say they have found strong evidence that a half-dozen major basins in India were formed a billion or more years ago, making them at least 500 million years older than commonly thought. The findings appear to remove one of the major obstacles to the Snowball Earth theory that a frozen Earth was once entirely covered in snow and ice – and might even lend some weight to a controversial claim that complex life originated hundreds of million years...

A sudden and extreme case of runaway global warming 635 million years ago was caused by an abrupt release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, scientists said today. The methane seeped from ice sheets that covered much of the planet toward the end of a frigid era called Snowball Earth. The gas escaped gradually at first and then very quickly from clathrates, or methane ice that forms and stabilizes beneath water ice sheets. As the water ice melted, pressure was relieved on the clathrates and they began to de-gas. The transition represents one of the earliest known cases of what...

<p>Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.</p> <p>As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.</p>

Ancient Imbalances Sent Earth's Continents "Wandering" Anne Minard for National Geographic NewsApril 7, 2008 A new study lends weight to the controversial theory that Earth became massively imbalanced in the distant past, sending its tectonic plates on a mad dash to even things out. Bernhard Steinberger and Trond Torsvik, of the Geological Survey of Norway, analyzed rock samples dating back 320 million years to hunt for clues in Earth's magnetic field about the history of plate motions. The researchers found evidence of a steady northward continental motion and, during certain time intervals, clockwise and counterclockwise rotations. That pattern matches the...

The ancient sea floor was discovered in southwest Greenland A sliver of four-billion-year-old sea floor has offered a glimpse into the inner workings of an adolescent Earth.The baked and twisted rocks, now part of Greenland, show the earliest evidence of plate tectonics, colossal movements of the planet's outer shell. Until now, researchers were unable to say when the process, which explains how oceans and continents form, began. The unique find, described in the journal Science, shows the movements started soon after the planet formed. "Since the plate tectonic paradigm is the framework in which we interpret all modern-day geology,...