Typical specimen of Globigerinatheka index from Hampden Beach. (Credit: Image courtesy of Cardiff University)
Posted on 03/06/2009 1:04:30 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A snapshot of New Zealand's climate 40 million years ago reveals a greenhouse Earth, with warmer seas and little or no ice in Antarctica, according to research recently published in the journal Geology. The study suggests that Antarctica at that time was yet to develop extensive ice sheets. Back then, New Zealand was about 1100 km further south, at the same latitude as the southern tip of South America -- so was closer to Antarctica -- but the researchers found that the water temperature was 23-25°C at the sea surface and 11-13°C at the bottom. "This is too warm to be the Antarctic water we know today," said Dr Catherine (Cat) Burgess from Cardiff University and lead-author of the paper. "And the seawater chemistry shows there was little or no ice on the planet." These new insights come from the chemical analysis of exceptionally well preserved fossils of marine micro-organisms called foraminifers, discovered in marine rocks from New Zealand. The researchers tested the calcium carbonate shells from these fossils, which were found in 40 million-year-old sediments on a cliff face at Hampden Beach, South Island... "Our work provides another piece of evidence that, in a time period with relatively high carbon dioxide levels, temperatures were higher and ice sheets were much smaller and likely to have been completely absent." The rock sequence from the cliff face covers a time span of 70,000 years and shows cyclical temperature variations with a period of about 18,000 years. The temperature oscillation is likely to be related to the Earth's orbital patterns.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Typical specimen of Globigerinatheka index from Hampden Beach. (Credit: Image courtesy of Cardiff University)
Global Warning Hysteria Alert!! Al Gore Mystified!!!
Mars On Earth: Arctic Crater Reveals Martian Secrets (pt 2)Haughton Crater is the remaining scar from a high-speed collision between Earth and some heavy object from space about 23 million years ago. The comet or asteroid that created the crater was perhaps more than a mile (up to 2 kilometers) across and slammed into the forest that existed on Devon Island. Everything was annihilated for scores of miles in all directions. The impact churned up rock from more than a mile below the surface, vaporizing much of it. It's estimated that between 70 and 100 billion tons of rock was excavated from the crater in the moments just after the impact. While clouds of dust and gas filled the air, rock rained down from the sky, much of it in the form of what geologists now call breccia, which simply means "broken up." Scattered within the breccia are pieces of a rock called gneiss that normally is dark and dense. In Haughton Crater breccia, the "shocked gneiss" resembles pumice stone -- it's ash-white, porous and very lightweight.Voices of the Rocks"Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete devastation... The world those fossils described, the one that flourished on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene epoch, was strikingly different from today's Arctic... Devon Island was covered with a forest of birch trees and conifers, a landscape that one now finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Maine. Now-extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater fish swam the lakes and streams...
by Robert Schoch
and Robert Aquinas McNally
(pp 1-3)
other supplier
"Even farther back, on the order of 45 to 65 million years ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, the fossil record shows Devon Island to have been still more profoundly different. Back then, what is now the Arctic was a region of swampy lowlands, slow-moving rivers, and towering forests of dawn redwood, kadsura, and ancestral forms of hickory, elm, birch, sycamore, and maple. Primitive fishes, crocodiles, salamanders, newts, and turtles inhabited the rivers and marshes, while the forests and meadows supported flying lemurs, early primates, forerunners of today's cats and dogs, and ancestors of the rhinos, tapirs, and horses."Northern Crater Shows Prehistoric Deep ImpactHaughton Crater is one of about 160 impact craters on Earth that range in size from 200 feet in diameter to 180 miles in diameter... About 15 miles from lip to lip, Haughton Crater is much smaller than Chicxalub, but it is an excellent crater to study because so little of it has eroded in millions of years. During the last ice age, Haughton Crater was protected by an ice field that sealed the crater from wind and extreme weather... Lakes formed in the bed of the crater, and it eventually began to resemble what it looks like today -- a 15-mile blemish that would catch your eye if you flew over it in an aircraft... Why study something that happened 22 million years ago?
by Ned Rozell
July 7, 1998
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Somehow the story manages to shill about so-called global warming.
Let’s see there is fossil fuel in the arctic and in the arabian deserts, which are both now places that are incapable of sustaining the plant and animal life needed to create fossil fuel. Therefore, the climate changed radically eons before man even appeared. Yet we are supposedly changing the climate by not using flouresecent bulbs.
Well, we better be looking at changing the Earth’s Orbital patterns then! Ohhhhh ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL would you get right on that Orbital change please Mr. Gore?
And the world did not end; life thrived and expanded. Mother Nature does just fine without our interference.
Note to ALgore
“in a time period with relatively high carbon dioxide levels”
How high?
How many PPM?
Amusingly, the magnetic pole used to have one end in Arabia. ;’)
Sumerians and others who write about the 12th planet and its cyclical effect on earth and the inner solar system, would say that is because Antarctica was not originally located at earth’s “South pole”
Some even speculate that Antarctica was once a tropical to temperate continent known as “atlantis”
amusingly some lore suggests that the great pyramid of Egypt is aligned at the original north pole
Wow, I'm amazed the film lasted that long.
Since there were dinosaurs on Antactica, this is not a big surprise
So.... who took the snapshot?
Did they use a Kodak Instamatic or a Brownie?
It’s too bad there wasn’t a primordial Al Gore there to save these little creatures from extinct as the oceans cooled.
Not necessarily. Over the time scales involved the continents slide around. Plate tectonics, you know. Antarctica hasn't always been at the south pole.
Magnetic North moves quite a lot in a short period of time. Wonder how this effects the climate and such? http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/nmp/long_mvt_nmp_e.php
Bush’s fault
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