Latest Nordic Stone Age Stories
Study suggests that Ice Age climate change did not pose significant challenges to first AmericansPaleoindian groups* occupied North America throughout the Younger Dryas interval, which saw a rapid return to glacial conditions approximately 11,000 years ago. Until now, it has been assumed that cooling temperatures and their impact on communities posed significant adaptive challenges to those groups. David Meltzer from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, USA, and Vance Holliday from...
An international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have found no evidence supporting an extraterrestrial impact event at the onset of the Younger Dryas ~13000 years ago.The Younger Dryas is an abrupt cooling event in Earth's history. It coincided with the extinction of many large mammals including the woolly mammoth, the saber toothed jaguar and many sloths. This cooling period is generally considered to be the result of the complex global climate...
In the film, "˜The Day After Tomorrow' the world enters the icy grip of a new glacial period within the space of just a few weeks. Now new research shows that this scenario may not be so far from the truth after all.William Patterson, from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, and his colleagues have shown that switching off the North Atlantic circulation can force the Northern hemisphere into a mini "˜ice age' in a matter of months. Previous work has indicated that this process would...
Scientists identify 'tipping points' at which sudden shifts to new conditions occurWhat do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth's climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common?According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead.In the paper, Martin Scheffer...
An article published in the prestigious science magazine Nature Geoscience yesterday shows that the period towards the end of the ice age was engraved by extreme and short-lived variations, which finally terminated the ice age.A group of scientists at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research and the University of Bergen in Norway, together with colleagues at ETH, Zürich, combined terrestrial and marine proxy palaeo-data covering the latest part of the ice age to improve our understanding...
Scientists warn the climate can abruptly change, based on data that shows 12,679 years ago a dramatic cooling of the climate happened in Western Europe due to a shift of icy winds over the Atlantic. Researchers looked at annual layers at the bottom of Lake Meerfelder Maar in Germany that showed an abrupt change in sediments consistent with a sudden chill over just one year. They studied pollens, minerals and other matter."Our data indicate an abrupt increase in storminess during the...
