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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/17/2003 4:06:23 PM PST by vannrox
Biologist Gerry Kuzyk was hiking with his wife in the remote reaches of the Yukon when he caught the putrid scent of caribou dung wafting through the chill air.
Then he saw it -- the biggest pile of animal droppings he had ever seen, 8 feet high and stretching over a half-mile of mountainside.
Kuzyk, a researcher with the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, knew there weren't enough caribou in the entire territory to create such an epic mound. Odder yet, there hadn't been caribou in the area for nearly a century.
"It was like being in the `Twilight Zone,' " said Rick Farnell, a colleague who helped investigate the find. "You could see them from a distance -- big, black bands of feces. I'm talking tons of it."
The mystery was solved by lab analysis: The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice.
Along with the dung, the scientists soon discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears.
For most scientists, from ecologists to climate experts, the warming of the planet is a disturbing trend that could radically alter the environment. But for archaeologists, it has prompted a breathtaking treasure hunt.
Without doing any digging, the scientists are scooping up artifacts, mummies and fossils long hidden in the depths of monstrous glaciers.
"We walk right up and pull arrows and animals out of the ice," Farnell said.
Many of the items are simply the random debris of 10,000 years of passing human and animal traffic. But the glaciers also have coughed up some stunning finds.
In 1991, Swiss hikers in the Alps found "Otzi," a 5,300-year-old ice man felled by a flint arrowhead. A second ice man with a perfectly preserved woven hat and gopher-skin cloak melted out of the ice in British Columbia in 1999.
"It's incredible what's in the ice," said James Dixon, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
Piece by piece, the artifacts rising from the ancient ice are beginning to recast archaeologists' understanding of the thousands of years after the last great ice age, an epoch when animals began probing the northern fringes of the planet and bands of humans began to populate North America in large numbers.
"There's a whole new scientific window opening," said Dixon, an expert on the human colonization of North America.
Unlike buried dinosaur fossils or crumbling Mayan monuments, the glacier artifacts are relatively unchanged from the day they were first encased in their icy tombs.
Arctic lupine seeds frozen for 10,000 years, for example, grew into healthy plants once they were removed from ice age lemming burrows.
The ice holds a zoo of perfectly mummified animals: fish, wapiti, sheep, mountain goats, moose, voles and birds.
"They're so beautifully preserved, they look like they're asleep," Farnell said. "You can't tell whether they died last week or died 4,000 years ago."
For archaeologists used to piecing together the past from chips of flint, finding soft organic material is rare bounty. They have flesh filled with DNA, feathers and dustings of ancient pollen. There are stomachs filled with the remnants of a last meal and patchworks of human tattoos.
The part of glaciers now melting captured a very particular slice of history -- a roughly 10,000-year period from the end of the last great ice age to the present.
The period began when the forbidding sheets of ice that had covered much of the Northern Hemisphere were beginning to retreat, opening a new realm of the planet to animals, birds and waves of human wanderers that eventually found their way to the Americas.
Over the ensuing years, the glaciers ebbed and flowed, driven by vast, cyclical changes in weather that could send tongues of ice rushing downward, only to retreat to alpine refuges a few hundred years later.
The last one, known as the Little Ice Age, began around 1450 and completed its cycle around 1900.
The planet is now in the midst of a natural warming cycle that has been compounded by a modern infusion of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide and other gases that are byproducts of industrialization. ....
(Excerpt) Read more at charlotte.com ...
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Funny, didn't know volcanos were byproducts of industrialization.
That's some caribou coordination / concentration.
Caribou dung crop circles for the tin foil brigade
The article could do without the stupid global warming crap (pardon the pun) obviously, there was no glacier when the poop was depositied on the mountainside. The ice came later.
DUH!!
All things considered, you were right to err on the side of caution and just excert the article, which contains a load of dung with the few words of token scientific discovery.
Global warming indeed.
Sounds like the full collection of the Clinton Presidential LIEbrary.
Now, no false moves please. I want you to hand over all the lupins you've got.
"We sit on lupines, we sleep in lupines, we feed the cat on lupines, we burn lupines, we even wear the bloody things!"
If true, maybe ELF should stop torching dealerships full of SUV's (it's for the good of the children, after all)
We should also force all volcanoes to be registered, then ban and destroy them...and all lightening (which causes wildfires, though burning forests are our friend, according to environazi wisdom) Makes as much sense as insisting that logging and wildfire suppression have caused fuel buildup which requires the Black Hills be logged to thin out said fuel (according to environazi treehugger groups like the Sierra Club).
Let's add burning forests to the list!!...and of course... Exhaling!!!
For most scientists, from ecologists to climate experts, the warming of the planet is a disturbing trend that could radically alter the environment
Interesting, wonder where they get the "most scientists" bit:
Seems as though there is room for substantial doubt as to any negative effect human created CO2, Methane etc. may have on our Climate future.
Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse
At least these folks believe so:
Petition Project: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p357.htm
During the past 2 years, more than 17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees, have signed the Global Warming Petition.
Specifically declaring:
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists (select this link for a listing of these individuals) who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
Signers of this petition also include 5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences (select this link for a listing of these individuals) make them especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide upon the Earth's plant and animal life.
Nearly all of the initial 17,100 scientist signers have technical training suitable for the evaluation of the relevant research data, and many are trained in related fields.
The planet is now in the midst of a natural warming cycle that has been compounded by a modern infusion of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide and other gases that are byproducts of industrialization. ....
The Bottom Line:
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Globally Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures
This chart shows the monthly temperature changes for the lower troposphere - Earth's atmosphere from the surface to 8 km, or 5 miles up. The temperature in this region is more strongly influenced by oceanic activity, particularly the "El Niño" and "La Niña" phenomena, which originate as changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The overall trend in the tropospheric data is near zero, being +0.04 C/decade through Feb 2002. Click on the chart to get the numerical data. |
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Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Figure 1-1 Global warming
Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years
Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years
Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice |
DUH!!
No joke. It's been known for many years that global heating and cooling happens in cycles. Scientists have found fossils of tropical plants and animals in northern Canada (and before SUVs, who'da thunk it?!). There's also good evidence that during the last ice age, most of North America was covered with thick ice. The temperature over geologic time has swung radically in both directions. The enviralists that try to blame the latest warming trend (if there even is one) on a wasteful American lifestyle are engaging in junk science and are outright lying. It's all a bunch of crap similar to what they just found in the Yukon.
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