Posted on 05/31/2006 11:52:30 AM PDT by AntiGuv
WASHINGTON - Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It's smack in the middle of the Arctic.
First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.
The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.
Skeptics of man-made causes of global warming have nothing to rejoice over, however. The researchers say their studies appearing in Thursday's issue of Nature also offer a peak at just how bad conditions can get.
"It probably was (a tropical paradise) but the mosquitoes were probably the size of your head," said Yale geology professor Mark Pagani, a study co-author.
And what a watery, swampy world it must have been.
"Imagine a world where there are dense sequoia trees and cypress trees like in Florida that ring the Arctic Ocean," said Pagani, a member of the multinational Arctic Coring Expedition that conducted the research.
Millions of years ago the Earth experienced an extended period of natural global warming. But around 55 million years ago there was a sudden supercharged spike of carbon dioxide that accelerated the greenhouse effect.
Scientists already knew this "thermal event" happened but are not sure what caused it. Perhaps massive releases of methane from the ocean, the continent-sized burning of trees, lots of volcanic eruptions.
Many experts figured that while the rest of the world got really hot, the polar regions were still comfortably cooler, maybe about 52 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the new research found the polar average was closer to 74 degrees. So instead of Boston-like weather year-round, the Arctic was more like Miami North. Way north.
"It's the first time we've looked at the Arctic, and man, it was a big surprise to us," said study co-author Kathryn Moran, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island. "It's a new look to how the Earth can respond to these peaks in carbon dioxide."
It's enough to make Santa Claus break into a sweat.
The 74-degree temperature, based on core samples which act as a climatic time capsule, was probably the year-round average, but because data is so limited it might also be just the summertime average, researchers said.
What's troubling is that this hints that future projections for warming, several degrees over the next century, may be on the low end, said study lead author Appy Sluijs of the Institute of Environmental Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Also it shows that what happened 55 million years ago was proof that too much carbon dioxide — more than four times current levels — can cause global warming, said another co-author Henk Brinkhuis at Utrecht University.
Purdue University atmospheric sciences professor Gabriel Bowen, who was not part of the team, praised the work and said it showed that "there are tipping points in our (climate) system that can throw us to these conditions."
And the new research also gave scientists the idea that a simple fern may have helped pull Earth from a hothouse to an icehouse by sucking up massive amounts of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, this natural solution to global warming was not exactly quick: It took about a million years.
With all that heat and massive freshwater lakes forming in the Arctic, a fern called Azolla started growing and growing. Azolla, still found in warm regions today, grew so deep, so wide that eventually it started sucking up carbon dioxide, Brinkhuis theorized. And that helped put the cool back in the Arctic.
Bowen said he has a hard time accepting that part of the research, but Brinkhuis said the studies show tons upon tons of thick mats of Azolla covered the Arctic and moved south.
"This could actually contribute to push the world to a cooling mode," Brinkhuis said, but only after it got hotter first and then it would take at least 800,000 years to cool back down. It's not something to look forward to, he said.
Well, then, if this happens we move to the arctic.
Sounds simple enough.
We adopt.
D
Yup and Halliburton was in on it selling sump pumps.
The Arctic was a happy, sunny place before President Bush! There were rainbows and bunnies and chocolate rivers!
No agenda in that "news" article, huh... Just the facts. Uh, right.
What if Canada builds a really big fence to keep us out? (or will I be accused of hijacking a thread again)?
Well was man using fossil fuels then? How could the earth have been so warm without man's interference?
I did a computer model of the artic temperatures based on this data and by measuring the temperature then and the temperature now we can expect further declines in the temperature, not an increase as the global warming crowd would have us believe.
Heck, I think I've seen those in Canada!
Give the Arctic a break. Global Cooling was the theory and the rage back in the seventies. Now that it's Global Warming, the Arctic is doing it's best to get hip by melting its icecaps, etc. But it takes time. You can't expect the Arctic to turn on a dime whenever a new trend comes along.
So, was this before the polarity reverse?
Instead of building my hurricane ready supplies .... should I just scrap the whole thing and buy a parka?
adapt?
In addition to plate tectonics, there's also the matter of the earth's precession. Every so often it tilts so that the Arctic faces more toward the sun, then away more. The changing tilts correspond to ice ages.
Bush must be a disgruntled Oompa Loompa is disguise!
That's it! The Golgafrinchams caused it!
There is no Arctic continent, and there wasn't one 55 million years ago either. It doesn't matter where the continents were. They drilled these cores from the ocean floor.
Bad news for all the salesmen and saleswomen out there! You could and may once again be able to sell AC and ice to Eskimos. Your legendary feats look small, now.
So why does the first graph on this website show CO2 levels 10 times current levels in several places while the earth was cooling?
Oops! I forget the link for my last post.
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
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