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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...

Kap København Formation Two Million Years Ago Reconstruction of Kap København formation two million years ago in a time when the temperature was SIGNIFICANTLY WARMER than northernmost Greenland today. Credit: Beth Zaikenjpg ******************************************************************************** A ‘game-changing’ new chapter in the history of evolution has been opened after two-million-year-old DNA has been identified for the first time. Researchers discovered microscopic fragments of environmental DNA in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA, which was sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “For the first time...

Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland...With animal fossils hard to come by, the researchers extracted environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, from soil samples..."I wouldn't have, in a million years, expected to find mastodons in northern Greenland," said Love Dalen, a researcher in evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University...

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...

Earth's Thick Ice Sheets Are Young BY JAKE HEBERT, PH.D. * | THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2019 Secular scientists have assigned vast ages—multiple hundreds of thousands of years—to the Dome Fuji, Vostok, and EPICA Dome C ice cores in Antarctica.1-3 They also claim to have counted more than 110,000 annual layers in Greenland’s deep GISP2 core.4 For this reason, some biblical skeptics think ice cores prove an old earth. However, the argument is not as strong as it appears, and there is positive evidence the ice sheets are young.

Asteroids have been hitting the Earth for nearly 1 billion years, but the atmosphere has largely shielded the planet from some catastrophic events. However, some space rocks make their way through — including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. But a new study notes that, over the past 290 million years, asteroids have been impacting the Earth at triple the rate they were previously and scientists aren't sure why. After looking at 1 billion years' worth of asteroid impacts on both the Earth and Moon, researchers found that dinosaurs' fate was perhaps an inevitability.

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...

About 2.6 million years ago, an oddly bright light arrived in the prehistoric sky and lingered there for weeks or months. It was a supernova some 150 light years away from Earth. Within a few hundred years, long after the strange light in the sky had dwindled, a tsunami of cosmic energy from that same shattering star explosion could have reached our planet and pummeled the atmosphere, touching off climate change and triggering mass extinctions of large ocean animals, including a shark species that was the size of a school bus. The effects of such a supernova—and possibly more than...

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....

Scientists were surprised by the results of their study. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In November, scientists from New Zealand used a hot water drill to go deep into Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf. The shelf, which can be up to 10,000 feet thick, is the largest of several that hold back West Antarctica's massive amounts of ice. If these were to collapse, global sea level would rise by ten feet. Drilling a hole and lowering a camera and thermometer inside is a way for researchers to understand the history of the shelf, and what is happening to it now. In measuring the temperature and...

SURPRISING FINDS The surprises began almost as soon as a camera was lowered into the first borehole, around December 1. The undersides of ice shelves are usually smooth due to gradual melting. But as the camera passed through the bottom of the hole, it showed the underside of the ice adorned with a glittering layer of flat ice crystals—like a jumble of snowflakes—evidence that in this particular place, sea water is actually freezing onto the base of the ice instead of melting it. “It blew our minds,” says Christina Hulbe, a glaciologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand,...

Researchers then scoured the globe for thin layers of radioactive isotopes in rock strata and in 1999 struck figurative gold: Samples from beneath the ocean revealed some hard metallic layers, known as ferromanganese crusts that form slowly over millions of years, containing iron-60, an isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years -- so short that the material must be much younger than Earth. The iron-60 was in a stratum laid down 2.2 million years ago. Similar layers of iron-60 have since been found elsewhere in the oceans. Astronomers have also been scouring the skies for groups of stars that...

The Thwaites glacier is one of the most rapidly changing in Antarctica. It’s been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks, after scientists suggested that this sector of the huge West Antarctic Ice Sheet was already on route towards collapse due to warming ocean temperatures. A major collapse of this part of the ice sheet could have dire consequences worldwide, with a global sea level rise of potentially up to 1m. Some models suggest this could take place comparatively rapidly, within a few centuries. But hidden beneath the kilometres of ice in this rapidly changing part of the...

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...