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UM: Antarctic elephant seal discovery sheds new light.link.

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.

A researcher in Antarctica uncovered a dead seal and wanted to get it carbon dated. It appeared fresh and he wondered how old it was. It dated to 1200 AD (plus or minus whatever). As he had subsequent dead seal finds carbon dated, all of them came out to 1200 AD. At first he thought he had some kind of sudden, unexplained seal die-off from approximately that year. Then he had another seal that he'd killed himself carbon dated in an effort to calibrate the dating... I saw this info in a 1985 interview with Barry Fell, in Horus vol II no 1, a journal published by David Griffard. Alas, DG went down in a private plane after the seventh issue.:

"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."

7,000 years and that the area was once warmer than it is today.

So if it were warmer then it must have gotten cooler so that we could now be undergoing global warming after global cooling......just wondering