Posted on 07/01/2011 7:58:45 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will be featured on the cover of the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
In the warmest period in Earth's past 55 million years, Antarctica was ice-free and forested. The continent's vast ice sheets, which today contain more than two-thirds of Earth's freshwater, began forming about 38 million years ago. The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts farther north than the rest of the continent, was the last part of Antarctica to succumb to ice. It's also the part that has experienced the most dramatic warming in recent decades; its mean annual temperatures rose as much as six times faster than mean annual temperatures worldwide.
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
Researchers ascertained the exact species of plants that existed on the Antarctic Peninsula over the past 36 million years during a three-year examination of thousands of grains of fossilized pollen, including this grain from the tree Nothofagus fusca. Credit: S. Warny/LSU
dead links (used to be anyway, haven't checked 'em lately):The Palæogeographical Relations of Antarctica...Among early Tertiary vegetation brought from Seymour Island in the Antarctic by Dr. Nordenskjöld's expedition, Dusén has recognised a species of Fagus and an Araucaria like A. brasiliensis (Schwedische Sudpolar. Exp., Bd. iii. Lief 3, 1908). In the light of this discovery the range of the living species of these genera acquires an importance for the student of the Antarctic hypothesis. The distribution of the beech trees is a particularly interesting one, for on the principle of Antarctic extension it is simple and intelligible, but without it is complicated and inexplicable.
by Charles Hedley
(1912)
This genus Fagus, sensu latu, has two representatives in Europe, one in North America, and several in China and Japan. But in South America there are eleven, in New Zealand seven, and in Tasmania with Australia three. The northern forms are deciduous, but with one or two exceptions the southern are evergreen. The genus being a natural one is certainly not of polyphyletic origin, and the question before us is, from what centre of migration has it spread? Did the southern species radiate from the south or converge from the north? It is a strong argument for a southern origin that the bulk of the species are southern. Again, the evergreen state is primitive, the deciduous derived, and this indicates that the northerners are offshoots from an evergreen stock. Thirdly, the southern species more closely resemble each other than any northern does any southern form. Even, as Mr. Rodway (Proc. Austr. Assoc. Adv. Sci. 1912) points out, the same parasite afflicts Tasmanian and South American trees. This agrees better with radiation from the south than with convergence from the north.
Mechanics of Displacements...the Antarctic beech trees are from two to three million years old. The point that was being made was that plate tectonics, as a theory, was incapable of explaining the existence of this forest so close to the South Pole a mere two to three million years ago. This is not to say that plate tectonics is wrong: it is simply insufficient on its own to account for these facts. At the slow pace of change demanded by plate tectonics the beech trees would have to be many millions (not just 2 or 3 million) of years old to be 200 miles from the South Pole. In other words, to account for the beech forest on Antarctica we need another whole Earth theory to explain the facts. Earth crust displacement is a complementary whole earth theory to plate tectonics that can account for these facts. We are not disputing the power of the plate tectonic theory: we are simply adding another set of lens with which the past might be viewed.
by Rand Flem-AthSpending Time and Wasting Space:What we find from the ice core dating is that Lesser Antarctica has been covered in ice for at least 122,000 years, if not more. But when we shift our attention to the opposite side of the globe and look at Siberia, Beringia and Alaska we do not find equivalent ice sheets. Instead we find evidence of many large mammals such as horses, bison and rhinoceros swarming over grasslands. How can one part of the globe be under ice for at least 122,000 years while the exact opposite of the globe has no ice and large mammals (dating from 11,000 to 70,000 carbon-14 years ago)? This does not compute. Either the evidence from the north is wrong or the evidence from the south is wrong.
or how ice core dating went wrong
by Rand Flem-Ath and Colin Wilson
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Regarding when Antarctica began to be iced up, http://newsdesk.org/2010/09/scientists-unmask-ghost-mountains-of-antarctica-at-last/ indicates that there’s a pretty broad range ~ anywhere from 35 million to 500 million years before present.
notice that while talking about the entire antarctic being FREE FROM ICE, they avoid even an estimate of how much hotter it was, even without humans and suv’s...
yet they STILL try to scare us like this:
“It’s also the part that has experienced the most dramatic warming in recent decades; its mean annual temperatures rose as much as six times faster than mean annual temperatures worldwide.”
...also, inside the article are interesting items like:
“In 2002, ... “It was the worst ice year that any of us could remember,””
fact is, Hadley CRU, and NASA, have been trying to “hide the decline”. because the Earth has been getting colder since at least 2003. the new solar minimum has us entering a “mini ice age” for the next 20-30 years.
even the Obama administration knows this. while screaming about warming, they admit it is significantly COLDER this year (found by Steely Tom):
” Cooling degree-days during 2011 are assumed to be 14 percent lower than last year, “
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2740366/posts
Yeah, because they’re demagogues.
Thanks muawiyah, it’s even broader than that.
the ice sheets contain 2/3s of the water on earth?????????????
2/3 of the fresh water.
12 million years ago, Antarctica wasn’t located at the South Pole?
Somebody should bottle that stuff before it all melts.
It has been considered before.
Oddly enough, there was no south pole back then. ;’)
There are two things going on; one, there’s the continental drift idea, which has been semantically dressed up under the name plate tectonics. It’s based on evidence (magnetic reversals found as “fossil” magnetism in lava flows. The lava flows are dated various ways, and the average period of time between reversals is something like 600K years I think. This is used (via the syllogism) to show that some of these lava flows froze with their trace magnetic fields pointed in the then-prevalent direction, but have since moved this or that way.
It’s assumed that the shift of the magnetic pole reflects something; some believe it follows the axis of rotation, but since the magnetic pole shifts continuously (it’s shifted quite a bit since I learned how to use a compass in Boy Scouts) and the axis of rotation manages only a couple of slight wobbles, most don’t buy into the idea that the axis of rotation shifts, even though there’s evidence that it has. For that matter, there’s evidence that the magnetic field of the Earth not only shifts, but also is much stronger from time to time. That’s been interpreted different ways, more later (after I sleep).
Hapgood originated (source?) the crustal displacement model, which allowed the surface to shift but avoided the problem of redirecting Earth’s momentum during a full change to the axis of rotation. The friction problems appear to be unsuperable.
Anyway, short story long, the magnetic pole of the Earth has been all over (it was once in the middle of Arabia, for example) while any shifts to the axis of rotation would be expected to leave behind evidence only of having happened, rather than amount and direction.
2/3rds of the fresh water, not the whole shebang.
If the parts of Antarctica which are currently above sealevel were to lose their ice (a good bit of the Antarctic ice is submerged as a consequence of having pushed down the elevation via the massive weight, and oozing off into the sea while still connected, that kind of thing), the surface area involved isn’t much compared to the 70+percent of the Earth’s surface that are the oceans and seas. So, the total sealevel rise from such an event would raise sealevels perhaps 40 feet, maybe a bit more.
To put this into perspective, during the most recent glaciation, the sealevel fell hundreds of feet (as much as 800 in the Bering Strait for example) and the Gobi Desert of today was the bed of an inland sea.
Now wait just a dang minute! How could Antarctica POSSIBLY have been ice-free and forested without humans creating all the CO2 that caused the ice to melt?! Then, how did the CO2 get cleaned up (without UN help) in order for the next ice age to occur?
Part of the trick here is that when you remove the existing ice sheets the land rebounds thousands of feet so the mountains get much higher relative to sea level.
More entertaining for those who want to see what happens when Antarctica hooks up to South America is a topic entitled "Circumpolar Cyclone" or "Antarctic Circumpolar Circulation" ~ which applies to air and sea. Without South America in the way the winds and water currents begin traveling in a large circle around Antarctica. That prevents warm ocean currents from getting close to the continent so it gets colder.
Currently it's "colder". Could actually get even "colder".
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re saying is this: the molten iron core rotates independently of the earth’s axis.
The magnetic axis can shift independently of the earth’s rotation as it spins through space.
WOW! That’s a mind blower, if that is what I think you are saying.
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