Free Republic

Study Led by the University College London (Ucl) Suggests That an Extreme Cooling Period Approximately 1.1 Million Years Ago Likely Contributed to the Extinction of Early Human Populations in Europe.Based on palaeoclimate evidence, the researchers found the occurrence of previously unknown extreme glacial conditions that pushed the European climate to levels beyond what archaic humans could tolerate, emptying the continent of human populations.The earliest human remains discovered in Europe originate from Iberia and provide evidence that early humans had migrated from southwest Asia around 1.4 million years ago...Researchers from UCL, the University of Cambridge, and CSIC Barcelona studied the chemical...

Sediment column at the mouth of the Amazon River. Credit: NASA The Amazon River has been around for 11 million years ago and in its shape for the last 2.4 million years ago, according to a study on two boreholes drilled in proximity of the mouth of the Amazon River by Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil. Until recently the Amazon Fan, a sediment column of around 10 kilometres in thickness, proved a hard nut to crack, and scientific drilling expeditions such as Ocean Drilling Program could only reach a fraction of it. Recent exploration efforts by Petrobras lifted...

A thought about ice cores just occurred to me, and I need someone in the know to verify or refute this argument. Scientists claim to know what the temperature was in past years primarily by drilling ice core samples. They measure levels of specific gasses, like carbon dioxide, that are trapped within the layers of the ice, and somehow they calculate the temperature for that time based off of "certain assumptions" (none of which are mentioned in the wikipedia article). That is rather dubious inandof itself, but I want to take that thought in a different direction. We all know...

The stunning sight of emerald green-colored icebergs in Antarctica has been documented for more than a century — in literature and beyond. For decades, scientists have argued about the cause behind the bizarre phenomenon and debated why the green-hued ice chunks aren't the typical blue or white color. But a recent discovery from a 2016 research trip to East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf may provide the final clue they've been waiting for. In a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, researchers found marine ice varies in color due to the "abundance of foreign constituents in the...

Full Title: "Scientists find preserved animal carcasses in mysterious Antarctic lake 'twice the size of Manhattan' buried under 3,500 feet of ice" Scientists in Antarctica have found preserved carcasses of tiny animals in a mysterious lake buried under more than 3,500 feet of ice. Mercer Subglacial Lake is a hydraulically active lake that lies more 1000m beneath the Whillans Ice Plain, a fast moving section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Researchers managed to drill into the lake for the first time earlier this year, and have now revealed they found signs of life. According to Nature, researchers found the...

Does a giant crater lie beneath the Antarctic ice? Signs of an ancient impact could help to explain a mass extinction. Mark Peplow A dense bit of rock in the Antarctic (orange circle) seems to be circled by a crater. © Ohio State University Evidence of a cataclysmic meteorite impact has been unearthed in Antarctica, according to researchers who say the collision could possibly explain the greatest mass extinction ever seen on our planet. But scientists contacted by news@nature.com say they are sceptical, as no signs of such an enormous impact have been found in other, well-studied areas of Antarctica....

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

What Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...

Fossil Frank has a hypothesis - inspired by certain shells taken from deep in a limestone quarry abutting the Everglades - that a great tsunami hit Florida about two million years ago. It happened in the evening - and he can prove it. More of this later. Before Frank Perillo became Fossil Frank he was an unhappy mechanic. He hated every day he lay on his back in Ketcham's garage. Winter days were worst, because his hands turned to meat from the cold and the lacquer thinners he used to wash himself. When he jacked up cars, the ice on...

There is a five-story, blood-red waterfall pouring slowly from the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valley. Its back story, at Atlas Obscura, is simply remarkable: Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity...

Global warming five million years ago may have caused parts of Antarctica's large ice sheets to melt and sea levels to rise by approximately 20 metres, scientists report today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The researchers, from Imperial College London, and their academic partners studied mud samples to learn about ancient melting of the East Antarctic ice sheet. They discovered that melting took place repeatedly between five and three million years ago, during a geological period called Pliocene Epoch, which may have caused sea levels to rise approximately ten metres.

The collision happened around 870 000 years ago, a time when Homo erectus, man’s early ancestor, was still roaming the planet. Molten asteroid slabs melted through more than 1.5 kilometres of ice and snow to reach the underlying bedrock... Billions of tons of ice, snow and rock would have been vaporised and thrown into the atmosphere. Rock particles that fell to the ground have been located more that 5 000 kilometres away in Australia. The impact was so immense that it is being considered as the cause of a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic polarity around this time. One...

From the file of “Things that would really be catastrophic”. Did a meteor have a role in a major shift in Earth’s Climate?The start of the Quaternary period (2.588 million years ago, where the Pliocene became Pleistocene) coincides with evidence of a mega tsunami in the South Pacific.The Eltanin Meteor fell into the South Pacific 2.5 million years ago setting off a (likely) tsunami that was hundreds of meters high and theoretically pushed mass material into the atmosphere which may have contributed to the cooling the globe had already started on. This meteor was hard to detect because it hit...

Cosmic Impact Site That Created Earth’s Axial Tilt and Fault Lines © Mihai Radu Draghici Abstract: Using Google Earth and browsing the geographic appearance of the Earth’s crust starting from the South Pacific Ocean right above Antarctica and traveling over to Drake’s Passage and into the South Atlantic Ocean there seems to be a visual trace that some sort of cosmic collision occurred in that area. (See Figure 1) The impact of the object surfed across the ocean and collided with the bottom of South America where it once connected to Antarctica creating Drake’s Passage opening. This impact also may...

Megaherbs flourished in Antarctica Wednesday, 19 March 2008 Stephen Pincock, ABC This daisy-like 'megaherb' may have once grown in Antarctica 2 million years ago before spreading north when the last ice age started (Source: David Norton) Giant flowers found on Australia and New Zealand's sub-Antarctic islands are probably survivors of lush forests that covered Antarctica before the beginning of the last ice age nearly 2 million years ago, scientists say. The flowers, known to researchers as megaherbs, grow abundantly on the tiny windswept islands such as the Snares, Auckland and Campbell island groups. Dr Steve Wagstaff from Landcare Research in...

An impact event occurred at 2.15±0.5 Ma in the Bellingshausen Sea. It littered the oceanic floor with asteroidal debris. This debris is found within the Eltanin Impact Layer. Although the impact layer was known, the crater had yet to be discovered. We have found a possible source crater at 53.7S,90.1W under 5000 meters of water. The crater is 132±5km in diameter, much larger than the previously proposed size of 24 to 80 km.

(Phys.org)—When a huge meteor collided with Earth about 2.5 million years ago in the southern Pacific Ocean it not only likely generated a massive tsunami but also may have plunged the world into the Ice Ages, a new study suggests. A team of Australian researchers says that because the Eltanin meteor – which was up to two kilometres across - crashed into deep water, most scientists have not adequately considered either its potential for immediate catastrophic impacts on coastlines around the Pacific rim or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet's climate system. "This is the only known deep-ocean impact...

Antarctic craters reveal strike The asteroid may have raised sea levels by up to 60cm Scientists have mapped enormous impact craters hidden under the Antarctic ice sheet using satellite technology. The craters may have either come from an asteroid between 5 and 11km across that broke up in the atmosphere, a swarm of comets or comet fragments. The space impacts created multiple craters over an area of 2,092km (1,300 miles) by 3,862km (2,400 miles). The scientists told a conference this week that the impacts occurred roughly 780,000 years ago during an ice age. When the impacts hit, they would have...

Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent 19 January 2003 Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago. Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years. Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to...

Mystery of the Eltanin Antenna 21-Jul-2001 Between 1962 and 1979 the NSF Polar Research Vessel Object Photographed by USNS Eltanin Eltanin surveyed Antarctic waters, studying the ocean and ocean bottom. In 1964, the ship photographed an unusual object at a depth of 13,500 feet. At the time, there was no submarine that could have carried a piece of technology to this depth. The object appears to be a pole rising from the ocean floor with twelve spokes radiating from it, each ending in a sphere. The spokes are at fifteen degree angles to each other. It is located approximately 1,000...