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Bulls Scarp could be the most fascinating and important archaeological site waiting to be surveyed in the region. There’s just one little problem: That Ice Age rock ledge is under about 140 feet of seawater.But a team of scientists recently studied and mapped it from the ocean surface. Now the team is looking for partners to go back.“We haven’t been on the bottom to look for artifacts and that’s what we’re trying to do. We feel very strongly this area would have held populations of people,” said Scott Harris, College of Charleston geology professor.“I think it’s fantastic. I can just...

The idea would make headlines around the world and bring tears of joy to the planet's journalists. An adorable baby woolly mammoth, tottering on its newborn legs, is introduced to the media. Cloned from a few cells scraped from the permafrost of Siberia, the little creature provides the latest proof of the might of modern science and demonstrates the fact that extinction has at long last lost its sting. It is a fascinating prospect, one that was raised again last week when the most recently discovered carcass of a mammoth was revealed to the public in Yokohama, Japan. The female,...

Early Americans faced rapid late Pleistocene climate change and chaotic environments The environment encountered when the first people emigrated into the New World was variable and ever-changing, according to a Penn State geologist. "The New World was not a nice quiet place when humans came," says Dr. Russell Graham, associate professor of geology and director of the Earth & Mineral Sciences Museum. Archaeologists agree that by 11,000 years ago, people were spread across North and South America, but evidence is building for an earlier entry into the New World, a date that would put human population of North and South...

Mesopotamian climate change Geoscientists are increasingly exploring an interesting trend: Climate change has been affecting human society for thousands of years. At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, one archaeologist presented research that suggests that climate change affected the way cultures developed and collapsed in the cradle of civilization — ancient Mesopotamia — more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence for a mass migration from the more temperate northern Mesopotamia to the arid southern region around 6400 B.C. For the previous 1,000 years, people had been cultivating the arable land in northern Mesopotamia, using natural rainwater...

As sabre tooth tigers and woolly mammoths were wandering around Europe, unique, giant prehistoric animals were living in Australia -- three metre tall kangaroos and wombat-like creatures, the size of a four-wheel drive, were just some of the curious creatures Down Under. Yet mysteriously, sometime during the last 100,000 years, they disappeared forever. The extinction of these giant animals, known as megafauna, has generated great debate. One group advocates "human blitzkrieg" -- those asserting the first Australians hunted these beasts to extinction. Others, myself included, find there is too little evidence to confidently attribute responsibility to any particular factor. Nonetheless,...

Predictions Part I astronomy and climatology http://home.earthlink.net/~gravitics/LaViolette/Predict.html Superwave Theory Predictions and their Subsequent Verification Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. Prediction No. 1...

15,000 to 11,000 years ago Earth experienced a series of climatic fluctuations... there was a short cold spell, known as the Younger Dryas, before the final warming and... end of the last ice age. Based on Greenland ice core data, the Younger Dryas began... 10,900 B.C., and its ending... circa 9700 B.C. and may have occurred within an incredible three years... I once hypothesized that comets were responsible. A comet hitting the land or a shallow ocean, or exploding above the land's surface, scattering dust and debris into the atmosphere, would cause global cooling... This pattern fits well with the...

This is a follow up posting to Younger Dryas -The Rest of the Story!Guest post by Don J. Easterbrook Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University.The Younger Dryas was a period of rapid cooling in the late Pleistocene 12,800 to 11,500 calendar years ago. It followed closely on the heels of a dramatically abrupt warming that brought the last Ice Age to a close (17,500 calendar years ago), lasted for about 1,300 years, then ended as abruptly as it started. The cause of these remarkably sudden climate changes has puzzled geologists and climatologists for decades and despite much effort to find...

A reindeer herder in Russia's Arctic has stumbled on the pre-historic remains of a baby woolly mammoth poking out of the permafrost, local officials said on Friday.

Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times by Richard B. Firestone & William Topping The Paleoindian occupation of North America, theoretically the point of entry of the first people to the Americas, is traditionally assumed to have occurred within a short time span beginning at about 12,000 yr B.P. This is inconsistent with much older South American dates of around 32,000 yr B.P.1 and the similarity of the Paleoindian toolkit to Mousterian traditions that disappeared about 30,000 years ago.2. A pattern of unusually young radiocarbon dates in the Northeast has been noted by Bonnichsen and Will.3,4 Our research...

“In 1990 they found that the Earth goes through abrupt temperature changes from deep ice samples in Greenland of about 10,000 years ago the Earth’s temperature dropped 19 degrees” (research found by weather channel) taking 5-10 years (weather channel) but from analytical data, I intend to show this could take for the most part one year (Robert T Bailey) and more shocking a large part of the temperature change will happen this year! The End of the World as we known it is coming; an ice Age will change the face of the Earth. We have a crisis here. In...

Contact: Joel Schwarz joels@u.washington.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington Evidence acquits Clovis people of ancient killings, archaeologists say Archaeologists have uncovered another piece of evidence that seems to exonerate some of the earliest humans in North America of charges of exterminating 35 genera of Pleistocene epoch mammals. The Clovis people, who roamed large portions of North America 10,800 to 11,500 years ago and left behind highly distinctive and deadly fluted spear points, have been implicated in the exterminations by some scientists. Now researchers from the University of Washington and Southern Methodist University who examined evidence from all suggested Clovis-age killing sites...

John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain  Abstract:We discuss how, in the 1970's, Eddy took clues from the historical researches of Spörer and Maunder in the 19th century to draw attention to the virtual absence of sunspot activity between 1645 and 1715. This ``Maunder Minimum'' is not only of interest to solar physicists in the context of the theory of solar magnetic activity, and to stellar astrophysicists working on the properties of cool stars, but may also be a vital clue to the influence of the variability of the Sun's...

Sunspots could be seen by the Soho telescope in 2001 (l), but not this year (r) There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time. The observations are baffling astronomers, who are due to study new pictures of the Sun, taken from space, at the UK National Astronomy Meeting. The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity. At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period. Last...

Source: University Of California - Berkeley Date: 2004-06-03 17th Century Solar Oddity Believed Linked To Global Cooling Is Rare Among Nearby Stars Berkeley - A mysterious 17th century solar funk that some have linked to Europe's Little Ice Age and to global climate change, becomes even more of an enigma as a result of new observations by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers. For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots - cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brighter surroundings - dropped a thousandfold, according to some...

Nanodiamonds found across North America suggest that major climate change could have been cosmically instigatedRoughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America. But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary...

Ice cores unlock climate secrets By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News Online science staff Tiny bubbles of ancient air are locked in the ice Global climate patterns stretching back 740,000 years have been confirmed by a three kilometre long ice core drilled from the Antarctic, Nature reports. Analysis of the ice proves our planet has had eight Ice Ages during that period, punctuated by rather brief warm spells - one of which we enjoy today. If past patterns are followed in the future, we can expect our "mild snap" to last another 15,000 years. The data may also help predict how...

PARIS (AFP) - The North Pole once had a balmy, sub-tropical sea because of extreme global warming, according to European scientists who have carried out the world's deepest drilling into ancient sediment on the far northern seabed. Cores retrieved from up to 430 metres (1,397 feet) below the seafloor in waters 1,300 metres (4,550 feet) deep show that, for a brief period which occurred around 55 million years ago, the Arctic Ocean was around 20 C (68 F), compared with today's typical average temperature of minus 1.5 C (29.3 F), they said on Tuesday. "It occurred during a period called...

If you are the kind of person who worries about the future, this might not make happy reading.Scientists have found that on average mammal species enjoy only 2.5 million years of life before being wiped out because of the Earth's "wobble." They say when the tilt and orbit reach key points it can spark dramatic global cooling - and the last time this happened was 2.6 million years ago. This suggests we are overdue a wave of extinction. However, before you panic, scientists say our planet has changed beyond all recognition in the last 3 million years. The new research...

More Sci-Fi reading for your summer weekend: Javed Ikbal writes "Decipher by Stel Pavlou is a mind-blowing work of science fiction. If you thought Stephenson's Snowcrash did a great job of bringing myth and science together, bite into this. I am still shaking my head over the amount of research that must have gone into this book." Read on for Javed's review. Warning -- spoilers within. What it's about: Tag line: Mankind had 12,000 years to decipher the message. We have one week left ... Let me make something clear. Although this is my first Slashdot review, I do not...