Posted on 11/01/2007 10:28:47 AM PDT by blam
Melting Glacier Reveals Ancient Tree Stumps
LiveScience.com
Tue Oct 30, 2:15 PM ET
Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum, a geologist said today.
Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the stumps revealed the wood was far from fresh—some of it dated back to within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age.
"The stumps were in very good condition sometimes with bark preserved," said Koch, who conducted the work as part of his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Koch will present his results on Oct. 31 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver.
The pristine condition of the wood, he said, can best be explained by the stumps having spent all of the last seven millennia under tens to hundreds of meters of ice. All stumps were still rooted to their original soil and location.
"Thus they really indicate when the glaciers overrode them, and their kill date gives the age of the glacier advance," Koch said. The age of the newly revealed ancient trees also indicates how long the glaciers have covered this region.
The recently warming climate released the stumps from their icy tombs, Koch said.
Koch compared the kill dates of the trees in the southern and northern Coast Mountains of British Columbia and those in the mid- and southern Rocky Mountains in Canada to similar records from the Yukon Territory, the European Alps, New Zealand and South America. He also looked at the age of Oetzi, the prehistoric mummified alpine "Iceman" found at Niederjoch Glacier, and similarly well-preserved wood from glaciers and snowfields in Scandinavia.
The radiocarbon dates seem to be the same around the world, according to Koch. There have been many advances and retreats of these glaciers over the past 7,000 years, but no retreats that have pushed them back so far upstream as to expose these trees.
The age of the tree stumps gives new emphasis to the well-documented before-and-after photographs of retreating glaciers during the past 100 years.
"It seems like an unprecedented change in a short amount of time," Koch said. "From this work and many other studies looking at forcings of the climate system, one has to turn away from natural ones alone to explain this dramatic change of the past 150 years."
I wonder what kind of trees they are. I betcha they’re trying to grow them as we speak.
That makes the Nobel Committee dumb as a bag of rocks.
Operatives from the Al Gore Indoctrination Center nearest you will be knocking on your door shortly.
With apologies to all bags of rocks, yes.
Well, obviously NOT a historic minimum, if the ice wasnt there back then to have trees growing!
No, it is indeed a historic minimum - it's the HISTORY that is short.
You’re right. Some rocks are clever.
GOT Fire WOOD?
This find proves that these northern climes were once warm enough to grow forests, even before the presence of man and machines, thus giving the lie to anthropomorphic climate change.
When the next ice age hits, the climatologists will be just as surprised as the woolly mammoths were.
When things were warmer 7,000 years ago, there was not a city of 2,000,000 less than 40 miles from the glacier. Nor did Canada’s largest port (Vancouver) exist then. Nor did the trans-Canada highway exist then. Nor were there various industrial developments (including forestry). All of these things contribute to local warming and forms of pollution (e.g., dust) that can contribute to a glacier melting. These local factors would have to be eliminated before it could be claimed that the globe is as warm now as it was 7,000 years ago, but “scientists†on the Global Warming gravy train are incredibly lazy. The fact that the Medieval Warm Period did not cause such an extensive retreat of the glacier all but proves that the cause is not “Global Warming”.
Thirty years ago “scientists” had brilliant ideas like covering snow with crude oil to combat ... GLOBAL COOLING!!
And we are supposed to trust them, once again, with even more alarmist GLOBAL WARMING!!
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/newsweeks-1975-article-about-the-coming-ice-age
At last. Thank you.
There are other potential variables that have to be considered, or dismissed. Polar shift, magnetic shift, ocean currents, and tectonics, perhaps geothermal, and probably not plate movement.
“I wonder what kind of trees they are.”
Well, in northern colorado in the Rockies there are old fossilized palm trees (millions of years old). I imagine these uncovered trees were more typical of what you might find in North America today - an evergreen of some sort I would imagine.
What if it’s a tree the likes of which we have never seen before. Now THAT would be interesting.
Johannes Koch of The CollegeTyping School in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles north of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Seven thousand years ago, the Atlantean Civilization caused Global Warming, despite their use of Cold Fusion.
Interestingly, the trees, Quercum Gorus grew without branches. The clusters of leaves grew on boles, or wrinkled craters, and each Spring, new puckered boles erupted, giving the trunks the appearance of the underside of octopus tentacles.
While written language was not in extensive use in that part of the world, racial and verbal memory did keep the idea alive, as when we describe a Global Warming Pimp as, "An Asshole, with Oak Leaf Cluster".
Reversal of global warming didn’t do those trees any good, did it?
Some of it...
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