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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2488774/posts

Oxford University is involved in a research project to unearth 30,000 year old climate records, before they are lost forever. The rings of preserved kauri trees, hidden in New Zealand’s peat bogs, hold the secret to climate fluctuations spanning back to the end of the last Ice Age... carbon dating and other analyses of the kauri tree rings. The trees store an immense amount of information about rapid and extreme climate change in the past. For instance, wide ring widths are associated with cool dry summer conditions... Tree rings are now known to be an excellent resource for extracting very precise and detailed data on atmospheric carbon from a particular time period. Therefore this study could help plug a large gap in our knowledge of climate change by extending historical weather records that only date back to the mid-nineteenth century... The research will focus on the last 30,000 years, but some trees date back 130,000 years. The period towards the end of the last Ice Age is particularly difficult to understand. This unique archive of kauri trees is likely to be lost within the next ten years because the timber is so highly-prized for furniture, arts and crafts. Kauri (Agathis australis) are conifer trees buried in peat bogs across northern New Zealand.

Oh, yes, it was very sophisticated to set forest fires to burn down the trees when the forests became to thick for the underbrush of berries and nut bearing apex trees to grow. The Indians in the Northwest were still doing this in the nineteenth century. The purpose was to make foraging easier.

In Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by the late David Griffard, Barry Fell was interviewed. Among other things:

We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm...

We had two successive volcanic eruptions on the island of Tonga. There were human remains, then a layer of lava, then more human remains, then a layer of lava. We took charcoal out of both layers and had them both dated -- and we didn't tell them, the dating people, which layer which came from -- and to our amazement we learned that the whole island of Tonga has rotated through 180 degrees and is now upside down. The top layer is older than the bottom layer of the charcoal.