Posted on 02/28/2011 5:16:59 PM PST by decimon
Cooling trend could be on the way unless thwarted by greenhouse gasses
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, February 28, 2011—There’s an old saying that if you don't like the weather in New Mexico, wait five minutes. Maybe it should be amended to 10,000 years, according to new research.
In a letter published recently in the journal Nature, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers and an international team of scientists report that the Southwest region of the United States undergoes "megadroughts"—warmer, more arid periods lasting hundreds of years or longer. More significantly, a portion of the research indicates that an ancient period of warming may be analogous to natural present-day climate conditions. If so, a cooler, wetter period may be in store for the region, unless it is thwarted by increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that could warm the planet.
Using a long core of sediments obtained in 2004 from beneath a dry lakebed located on the Valles Caldera National Preserve—an 86,000-acre grassland located on the site of a dormant prehistoric volcano about 20 miles west of Los Alamos—the researchers were able to peer back in time into the climate as it existed between 360,000 and 550,000 years ago. Layers in the 260-foot-long sediment core were easily distinguishable, and were bounded by distinct layers of volcanic ash that allowed for very accurate dating. Researchers looked at chemical constituents trapped within the layers as well as plant and pollen debris to characterize the climate conditions of the time.
The sediment layers from beneath the South Mountain Lake covered two "interglacial" periods. Such periods are significant because they represent a time between ice ages when warmer temperatures mimicked present-day temperatures.
(Excerpt) Read more at lanl.gov ...
Where have all the FReepers gone,
long time posting.
Do you mean to say that dry lake beds indicate a lack of rain?
Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni
Nothing wrong with that.
Let's hope they get their quick and dirty stuff out of the way and then carefully put it away where it's safe.
Future technology will make it possible to check through it to find DNA so we can identify the presence of various species.
Please direct me to where they credit any previous studies. It's announced like the discovery of the Millennium.
We already can identify the presence of various species through stratigraphic fossil correlation and pollen/spore studies, etc. I'm not against using better technology to examine old data but the young Turks should not take credit for previous work. Also this seems to be a another AGW ploy posing as "objective science."
Cute. I mean to say that currently populated areas -- the Los Angeles Basin, Las Vegas, Phoenix and the rest of the Southwest -- are subject to severe periodic 200 to 1,000-year or longer droughts, not the brief alternating dry and wet spells of historical record. That knowledge has been around for generations. These guys give the impression they discovered it. It's nice they added a few new data points but the references to AGW make me think their "study" is not the least bit objective.
Visited here a few years back. One of the most unusual and interesting place we’ve ever been.
So many vestiges of the past with an advanced nuclear research facility in the middle.
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