Posted on 12/18/2008 11:35:27 AM PST by BGHater
The result of a Danish ice drilling project has become the international standard for the termination of the last glacial period. It ended precisely 11,711 years ago.
A Danish ice drilling project has conclusively ended the discussion on the exact date of the end of the last ice age.
The extensive scientific study shows that it was precisely 11,711 years ago - and not the indeterminate figure of some 11,000 years ago that the ice withdrew, allowing humans and animals free reign.
According to the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen, the very precise dating of the end of the last Ice Age has made Denmark the owner of the Greenwich Mean Time of the end of the last glacial period and beginning of the present climate the so-called International Standard Reference.
Kilometres of ice It took several thousand years to warm up the earth and melt the kilometre thick ice caps that covered large parts of the northern hemisphere during the last glacial period and as a result the transition from Ice Age to the current period has lacked a clearly defined point in time.
The answer has now been found in the NordGrip drilling project in Greenland.
Our new, extremely detailed data from the examination of the ice cores shows that in the transition from the ice age to our current warm, interglacial period the climate shift is so sudden that it is as if a button was pressed, explains ice core researcher Jørgen Peder Steffensen, Centre for Ice and Climate at NBI at the University of Copenhagen.
Ice core reference When ice cores, that are formed by annual snowfall that is compressed into ice, are drilled out and analysed, the three kilometre ice cap in Greenland has acted like a filing cabinet of the climate detail of past geological periods.
It is the first time an ice core has been used as an international standard reference for a geological period and it is a great recognition of our extremely detailed scientific data, Jørgen Peder Steffensen said.
Jørgen Peder Steffensen of the Niels Bohr Institute showing the exact point in the ice cap where the last Ice Age ended - 11,711 years ago.
Ping. Maybe for inv.
No word on the exact day or month. Lol. Dunno if there was a party as well.
Dang it, you beat me to it!
11,711 years, 32 days, 17 minutes, 26 seconds ago.
The guard replies, "They are 73 million, four years, and six months old."
"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"
The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were seventy three million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago."
And the rather large object in his hands scared the willies out of me!
In October, about tea time.
Do you suppose they found a hubcap from a Cro-magnon SUV?
Yeah, but at what time? See ya'll aren't so smart after all. ... *snicker*
I am not sure that I care about an exact date. Its just that when you are dealing with geologic issues, fast changes are not usually good for the people or animals on top of the geology.
Yeah, but at what time? See ya’ll aren’t so smart after all. ... *snicker*
Oh, probably Ice Age Saving Time.
Spring forword, fall back...11,711 years.
“I remember it well. You wore blue, the Germans wore gray.”
Jørgen Peder Steffensen of the Niels Bohr Institute showing the exact point in the ice cap where the last Ice Age ended - 11,711 years ago.
That's some Peder Steffensen Jørgen's holding. Hope he doesn't plan to Bohr Niels with it.
If you look real close, you can see the throttle linkage from a P-38 lightning in that ice core he’s holding.
A.m or p.m.?
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter XVII (Pg 209)
The warming probably began 5,000 or more years before the actual end of the ice age; it took a lot of time to melt all those glaciers.
I never dated an Ice Age, but I did date this one gal that was.....oh - never mind!
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