Posted on 09/20/2012 5:02:02 AM PDT by Renfield
(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 event on the planet and it's largely been forgotten because there's no obvious giant crater to investigate, as there would have been if it had hit a landmass," says Professor James Goff, lead author of a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science. Goff is co-director of UNSW's Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Laboratory....
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
What about Burkle? Not deep enough?
Catastrophism ping
2.5 million years ago, and it’s still Bush’s fault.
My understanding was that ice ages are cyclical due to a pattern of variation in Earths orbit around the sun.
I was under the same impression...but I believe, it is also connected to the joining of north and south American changing the ocean flow.....
Ok, so why is the article even talking about “the” ice age...as if there were only one?
So I guess meteors have more or less regularly been hitting the earth every 100,000 years or so to cause the alternating glacial periods separated by a 10,000 or so interglacial warm period.
Even at the height of this GLobull Warming hysteria, the sad irony is that no one ever mentions the fact that we are still in an Ice Age - albeit an Interglacial Warm Period.
Good find! Thanks!
The ice ages appear in cycles. But this isn’t speculating about why they have a cyclical nature, but rather what caused the first cycle.
Much more convincing as a cause was the discovery that ice age cycles occur when there is a continent at the South Pole.
Oooh, I’m looking forward to this. But I’ll look when I’m somewhere that it’s easier.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield, and thanks DBrow for that link. |
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Nice graphic. Notice how the past four glacial periods have been increasingly colder? The trend of the interglacials is decreasing average temperature. And the temperature trend of the last 2000 years has been downward. I don’t think we have a whole lot of time left until the next deep freeze.
Methinks the only thing saving us from a deep cooling now is ... “global warming”.
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