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Drought has dried up what was Mexico’s second-biggest lake, destroying a once thriving fishing economy in Michoacán. The scale of the problem? Lake Cuitzeo should have 800 million cubic meters of water, but today it doesn’t even have 200. Now, the more than 300-square-kilometer reservoir has become a cemetery for fishing boats and a shortcut for motorists to reach Morelia, the state capital of Michoacán. The water disappearance also creates frequent and prolonged dust clouds that sometimes reach nearby communities, affecting health of residents, as well as causing allergies, respiratory illnesses and gastrointestinal complications from the bacteria they transport. Everything...

At the end of April 2021, drought conditions were covering 85 percent of Mexico. Numerous lakes and reservoirs have dried up, or are in the process of drying up, including the country's second-largest body of freshwater -- Lake Cuitzeo. Before the current drought, Lake Cuitzeo was Mexico's second-biggest lake, with an area of approximately 300 - 400 km2 (120 - 150 mi2), and the site of a thriving fishing economy in Michoacán. Now, this is a cemetery of abandoned fishing boats and a shortcut for motorists which creates frequent and prolonged dust clouds that reach municipalities 20 km (12.4 miles)...

Central Mexico’s Lake Cuitzeo contains melted rock formations and nanodiamonds that suggest a comet impacted Earth around 12,900 years ago, scientists say. CREDIT: Israde et al. (2012) New evidence supports the idea that a huge space rock collided with our planet about 13,000 years ago and broke up in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests. This impact would have been powerful enough to melt the ground, and could have killed off many large mammals and humans. It may even have set off a period of unusual cold called the Younger Dryas that began at that time, researchers say. The...

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Anthony Watts WUWT readers may recall this recent story: New evidence of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact The story below provides much more detail about the Younger Dryas event and the split that has developed in the scientific community over the cause. I’ve added this graph below from NCDC to give readers a sense of time and magnitude of the event. – Anthony The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. From:Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 19, Issues 1-5, 1 January 2000, Richard B. AlleyGuest Post By: Rodney Chilton www.bcclimate.com A consideration of many...

Hour-long hailstorm may have caused 1,000-year freeze, say scientists An hour-long hailstorm from space may have changed the climate of the Earth in 11,000 BC, leading to a freeze lasting more than 1,000 years, scientists say. Published: 8:00AM BST 02 Apr 2010 An hour-long hailstorm from space may have changed the climate of the Earth in 11,000 BC, leading to a freeze lasting more than 1,000 years, scientists say. A comet may well have caused the earth to freeze for over 1,000 years Photo: GETTY The catastrophe, caused by a disintegrating comet, wiped out large numbers of animal species and...

Nanodiamonds found across North America suggest that major climate change could have been cosmically instigatedRoughly 12,900 years ago, massive global cooling kicked in abruptly, along with the end of the line for some 35 different mammal species, including the mammoth, as well as the so-called Clovis culture of prehistoric North Americans. Various theories have been proposed for the die-off, ranging from abrupt climate change to overhunting once humans were let loose on the wilds of North America. But now nanodiamonds found in the sediments from this time period point to an alternative: a massive explosion or explosions by a fragmentary...

Scientists, it's said, behave more like lawyers than philosophers. They do not so much test their theories as prosecute their cases, seeking supportive evidence and ignoring data that do not fit—a failing known as confirmation bias. They then accuse their opponents of doing the same thing. This is what makes debates over nature and nurture, dietary fat and climate change so polarized. But just because the prosecutor is biased in favor of his case does not mean the defendant is innocent. Sometimes biased advocates are right. An example of this phenomenon is now being played out in geology over the...

We report the discovery in Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico of a black, carbon-rich, lacustrine layer, containing nanodiamonds, microspherules, and other unusual materials that date to the early Younger Dryas and are interpreted to result from an extraterrestrial impact. These proxies were found in a 27-m-long core as part of an interdisciplinary effort to extract a paleoclimate record back through the previous interglacial. Our attention focused early on an anomalous, 10-cm-thick, carbon-rich layer at a depth of 2.8 m that dates to 12.9 ka and coincides with a suite of anomalous coeval environmental and biotic changes independently recognized in other...