Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 07/24/2008 9:04:50 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
A college student's new discovery of fossils collected in the East Antarctic suggests that the frozen polar cap was once a much balmier place.
The well-preserved fossils of ostracods, a type of small crustaceans, came from the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains and date from about 14 million years ago. The fossils were a rare find, showing all of the ostracods' soft anatomy in 3-D.
The fossils were discovered by Richard Thommasson during screening of the sediment in research team member Allan Ashworth's lab at North Dakota State University.
Because ostracods couldn't survive in the current Antarctic climate, their presence suggests that the southern-most continent hasn't always been as frigid as it is today.
"Present conditions in this Antarctic region show mean annual temperatures of minus 25 degrees C (Celsius) [minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Mark Williams of the University of Leicester, co-author with Ashworth of the fossil-find report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "These are impossible conditions to sustain a lake fauna with ostracods."
--snip--
Marchant estimated that the summer temperatures in Antarctica would have been about 30.6 degrees F (17 degrees C) warmer than they are now.
This warmer period started to end when the first continent-sized ice sheets began appearing on Antarctica around 34 million years ago, around the end of the Eocene epoch. These ice sheets expanded and contracted until around 14 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch, when a dramatic cooling took place and transformed the tundra into an environment "that today looks like Mars," Marchant told LiveScience.
Marchant said climatologists are uncertain exactly what caused this intense period of cooling.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Well, that is just not possible. Because everything is going to die, if becomes even 2 degrees hotter on this planet. I know because “everyone” says so.
Since Tectonic Plate theory holds that Antarctica was part of a supercontinent including Australia and India and New Zealand, which split up shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs. No surprise that it was warmer before it arrived at the South Pole.
It’s called “Before the Flood”....
Ostracods are cute but not as fascinating as conodonts.
God Bless Pangea and Gondwanaland.
Long live continental drift.
Will someone give Al Gore a super-enema?
Halliburton has these big oilfield pump trucks which can out do several normal firetrucks and I was thinking...............
This warmer period started to end when the first continent-sized ice sheets began appearing on Antarctica around 34 million years ago
34 million years ago there was little difference in Antarctica's location.
Since we know that the axis of rotation of the earth has moved over the eras, but shows no movement in those charts, it seems likely that the charts were drawn in such a way as to keep the current orientation. This does not mean that the south pole has always been in Antactica, or its proto-continental ancestors.
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Gods |
Note: this topic is from July 24, 2008. |
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