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Ice Age Lion Man is world’s earliest figurative sculpture • Work carved from mammoth ivory has been redated and 1,000 new fragments discovered—but it won’t make it to British Museum show The star exhibit initially promised for the British Museum’s “Ice Age Art” show will not be coming—but for a good reason. New pieces of Ulm’s Lion Man sculpture have been discovered and it has been found to be much older than originally thought, at around 40,000 years. This makes it the world’s earliest figurative sculpture. At the London exhibition, which opens on 7 February, a replica from the Ulm...

"The Sun is god!” cried JMW Turner as he died, and plenty of other people have thought there was much in his analysis. The Aztecs agreed, and so did the pharaohs of Egypt. We are an arrogant lot these days, and we tend to underestimate the importance of our governor and creator. We forget that we were once just a clod of cooled-down solar dust; we forget that without the Sun there would have been no photosynthesis, no hydrocarbons — and that it was the great celestial orb that effectively called life into being on Earth. In so far as...

Ice Age warmth wiped out lemmings, study findsBy Michelle Warwicker BBC Nature 26 November 2012 Last updated at 22:07 Lemmings became "regionally extinct" five times due to rapid climate change during the last Ice Age, scientists have found. **SNIP** Instead the tests revealed that genetically distinct populations of lemmings were "present at different points in time" during the Late Pleistocene, 11,700 to around 126,000 years ago, meaning that the lemming population had been wiped out multiple times and then re-colonised some time after, possibly from populations in eastern Europe or Russia. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the...

(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.

Geologists long rejected the notion that cataclysmic flood had ever occurred—until one of them found proof of a Noah-like catastrophe in the wildly eroded river valleys of Washington State. After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I had become embarrassed that I hadn’t yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous Ice Age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So I decided to help lead a field trip for students to see the giant erosion scars on the local landforms.We drove across the Columbia River and continued eastward, dropping into Moses Coulee, a...

Brasilia, Jun 7 (Prensa Latina) Record cold winter temperatures have come to South America this year, in places such as the town of Quaraí in the Brazilian region known as the Western Frontier, where a temperature of 2.2 degrees Celsius, the lowest of the year, was registered. In this region, where winter extends between June and September, the outbreak of Antarctic air keeps millions of people on alert. According to the Meteorological Institute, other Brazilian towns reported freezing temperatures, such as Vacaria with -2.1 degrees, Sao Jose dos Ausentes, with -0.9 degrees, Sao Gabriel, -0.8 and Santa Rosa, -0.8 degrees....

Apparently, the magnetic shifts in the Sun mimic those that occurred during the mini-Ice Ages of the 17th century, reports the Japanese Astronomical society. They also claim that this is the reason for the "halting" in the progress of global warming. Basically the sun's magnetic field has shifted from a straight N-S configuration - to a N-Equator Equator-S, 4 pole configuration This supposedly occurred during the 17/18th century and was responsible for the mini Ice Age.

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,...

Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented. The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era? Guest post by “Zombie”I just finished reading a...

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world...

The supposed ‘consensus’ on global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food. there is a 92% chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place...

You need to curb those carbon emissions or else you’ll be responsible for warming up the planet, sinking the Maldives and ruining skiing season for everyone. Just ask Al Gore. But apparently the “settled science” still isn’t quite so settled, at least not at Cambridge. Scientists there have concluded a lengthy study of climate cycles as they relate to “wobbles” in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and reached a somewhat different conclusion… man’s emissions of carbon might be the only thing standing between us and another ice age. Researchers used data on the Earth’s orbit and other things to...

They come out from under their rocks every time we have a few tornados and never miss an opening when it comes to exploiting popular ignorance. An AP column last Friday titled Science panel: Get ready for extreme weather opened by asserting – “Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia's devastating heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world. That is the warning from top international climate scientists and disaster experts after meeting in Africa.” And of course their thesis is that this weather is the fault of mankind. They fail to mention that for the...

The eruption of a volcano in Virunga National Park near Goma is seen at night. Volcano fanatics will have to pay $300...The eruption of a volcano in Virunga National Park near Goma is seen at night. Almost three weeks after a fissure opened amidst dense flat forest, the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park has seen an increasing number of tourists seeking to be guided on treks to witness the Nyamulagira volcano spewing geysers of lava into the night.

The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought – and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That's the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine. As more greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, more heat is trapped and temperatures go up – but by how much? The best estimates say that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, temperatures will rise...

At Watts Up With That, data from the National Climatic Data Center are reviewed. The results are quite startling. Every region of the continental United States has shown a cooling trend during the winter from 2001 to the present, and five of the nine regions have also had a cooling trend during the summer. With respect to annual mean temperature, only one of nine regions–the Northeast–has gotten warmer; the other eight have gotten cooler.

Look at this weekend’s Halloween snowstorm. Headlines across the U.S.A. called it “historic.” Historic because it dumped record snowfall on at least 20 cities from Maryland to Maine. Historic because it was the most snow – and the earliest – in many areas since the end of the Civil War. And we’re not talking mere tenths-of-an-inch here. This snowfall shattered the old records, it obliterated them.

Paleontologist Guillermo Rougier, Ph.D., professor of anatomical sciences and neurobiology at the University of Louisville, and his team have reported their discovery of two skulls from the first known mammal of the early Late Cretaceous period of South America. The fossils break a roughly 60 million-year gap in the currently known mammalian record of the continent and provide new clues on the early evolution of mammals. Details of their find will be published Nov. 3 in Nature. Co-authors are Sebastián Apesteguía of Argentina's Universidad Maimónides and doctoral student Leandro C. Gaetano. The new critter, named "Cronopio dentiacutus" by the paleontologists,...

Nations most at risk from global warming Save this story to read later AAP October 26, 2011 10:17AM A THIRD of humanity, mostly in Africa and South Asia, face the biggest risks from climate change and rich nations in northern Europe will be least exposed, according to a new report. Bangladesh, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are among 30 countries with "extreme'' exposure to climate shift, according to a ranking of 193 nations by Maplecroft, a British firm specialising in risk analysis. Five Southeast Asian nations - Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia - are also...