Posted on 12/29/2007 9:07:37 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The rocks are pebbles. In a real scientific picture they would put a backpack or an iPhone or something of sort of known size, amybe even a footlong ruler.
:’)
Brenda Hall, researcher at the University of Maine, holds onto an elephant seal tibia (leg bone) that was so well preserved that it still has flesh attached. The bone was found in a frozen beach in Antarctica. (Bangor Daily News/Michael York)
The presence of the seals in the Ross Sea, a section of the continent that today is too cold to support them, is an indication that climate in that area has changed in the past 7,000 years and that the area was once warmer than it is today.
"We learned that seals were coming to a bad end and being mummified by nature in Antarctica in 1200 A.D. That was interesting and we wondered what was happening in Antarctica at that time...one of the technicians... noticed that a seal carcass that he himself had shot for dog-meat and that got left out through the winter... [looked] just like the mummified seals that they had been sending in. So without telling too many people what he was doing, he sent this mummified seal to be carbon-dated and do you know it was dated to 1200 A.D., and he had shot it the year before. When that was made public it really caused a storm."
http://quest.nasa.gov/antarctica/background/NSF/valleys.html
Mummified seals
The lower part of the Wright Valley, below Lake Vanda, is zoologically interesting. Scattered over several miles are mummified, rock-hard carcasses of Weddell seals. Radiocarbon dating of the remains is difficult, but scientists estimate that the carcasses are between 2,500 to 3,500 years old. Their travel inland so far from their coastal habitat is somewhat of a mystery.
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bio15Tuat03-t1-body-d10.html
THE PRESENCE OF mummified seal carcases in both glaciated and ice-free regions of McMurdo Sound was first reported by early British expeditions (Scott, 1905; Wilson, 1907). Dead crabeater seals (Lobodon carcinophagus) were found as much as 35 miles inland on the surface of a glacier more than 3000 feet above sea level. Similarly, Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) were found 20 miles inland at heights of 2400 feet (Wilson, 1907) and one Weddell seal was found at 5000 feet (Scott, 1905).
Summary
1. The locations of 121 mummified seal carcases encountered in ice-free Victoria and Wright Valleys of South Victoria Land are described. Seal remains were found up to 40 miles inland and at a maximum altitude of 3000 ft.
2. Seventy-two seals were examined in detail; of these 35 were identified with certainty as crabeaters (Lobodon carcinophagus) and 6 as Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddelli).
3. The condition of the seals varied from ‘minimal’, represented by small pieces of skin and bone, to one relatively fresh carcase.
4. Samples from two seal carcases gave radiocarbon ‘ages’ of 780 years and 100 years.
5. An average rate of entry into the valley system of one seal every 4-8 years has been calculated using the condition of the seal remains in relation to the radiocarbon ‘ages’ obtained.
6. All the carcases measured were those of immature animals, apparently less than one year old. It is suggested that the mummified remains represent disorientated young that fail to return to the pack-ice at the onset of winter. Some of these seals enter the dry-valley region to die of starvation, and to be preserved to view.
There we have it. Seal pups get lost, ‘walk’ 40 miles and climb to an elevation of 3,000 feet.
Scattered over several miles are mummified, rock-hard carcasses of Weddell seals. Radiocarbon dating of the remains is difficult, but scientists estimate that the carcasses are between 2,500 to 3,500 years old. Their travel inland so far from their coastal habitat is somewhat of a mystery.Tsunami? Of course, not having a reliable date (a 1000 year range that recent means there isn't one) makes it difficult to claim a single event, or even a handful of events. Maybe we're dealing with the Thunderbird -- it grabbed the seals, flew up and inland, and dropped 'em to kill 'em, planning to munch 'em later... ;')
Why are Thunderbirds extinct? The thermostat on their freezer was set to defrost every three millenia and that’s a long time between meals.
Ack!!! I’ll take the trolls.
:’D
I wish there were some captions on those pics. Looks like I'll hafta go scouting around for additional info on Antarctica. BTW, what's your best guess when Antarctica was last ice free???
Just a suspicion, but I suspect there may be some interesting artifacts found "under" the ice.
I was just thinking about that...!
In the summer of 2004, the North Greenland Ice Core Project cut all the way through the ice (over 10,000 feet deep) and brought up a sample of soil from the surface of Greenland (image above.) And a bit of organic matter was embedded in that first four-inch diameter sample of Greenland muck (top right image.) The organic matter might be a pine needle, a piece of bark, or possibly grass. The press release states that, "The presence of plant material under the ice indicates that the Greenland ice sheet formed relatively fast, as a slowly growing glacier would have flushed or pushed these light particles away."...
...The Antarctic ice is a bit deeper than the Greenland ice, but it, too "runs out." Before this, there is no evidence of glaciers anywhere on Earth. Standard Ice Age theory places the beginning of the Ice Ages about 2 million years ago (so far, the ice cores have drilled through 123 thousand layers in Greenland; 174 thousand layers in Antarctica.) And geology books point out that glaciation has been a rare event in Earth's history. The last episode (earlier than our very recent Ice Ages) happened before the first dinosaurs were born. Over 200 million years of Earth's prehistory passed without glaciers...
The spectacular striated ice wall at Fearn Lake
METHANE ALERT!
A microbe from deep in Greenland ice in the process of dividing.
Variations in methane concentration in ice cores, such as the 3,053-meter-long (10,016-foot-long) core obtained by the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2, have been used to gauge past climate. In that core, however, some segments within about 100 meters, or 300 feet, of the bottom registered levels of methane as much as 10 times higher than would be expected from trends over the past 110,000 years...
(That's because there's an underwater volcano nearby, you dummies!)
Something seems amiss here but I can't quite put my finger on it.
LOL! Do you have the feeling I do - we are mushrooms? They are feeding us manure and keeping us in the dark?
http://earthsci.org/education/Lake_Vostok/vostok.html
http://earthsci.org/education/Lake_Vostok/Microbes_small.jpg
Heh; I'm not sure what to make of it, but at the risk of asking the obvious, wouldn't it be a good idea to at least attempt to date the material they recovered under the ice? Or maybe since it's been entombed within the ice a carbon date can't be obtained? I mean, it seems the "scientific community" tries to carbon date everything they get their hands on, so why not Greenland muck?
Although the dates aren't exactly spelled out, presumably they have a fairly good idea how far back in time the ice cores go, so where's the beef???
A varve is an annual layer of sediment or sedimentary rock.
1867 - The tree was 4 inches in diameter and 26 feet tall when Alaska was purchased from the Russians.
However, the layers in ice cores are not generally visible in the ice. They only become apparent when the core is analysed for a chemical signal that varies with the seasons, which most signals do, to some extent. In fact the clearest dating is obtained when several seasonal signals are examined and compared...
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Varves maybe...tree-rings, probably...'layers' in ice-cores? Probably not. Perhaps they have been counting HEAVY SNOWFALLS!
(And if so, any carbon dating result from the material brought up from beneath the ice in Greenland would really mess up the dates!)
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