Latest Paleoclimatology Stories
Scientists are now making an alarming claim that the earth is on the brink of entering another Ice Age that could last the next 100,000 years.They believe a 12,000-year warming period is currently winding down. They say ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age patterns, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.Experts point out that most of...
Welsh scientists studying marine fossils say they've determined Antarctica 40 million years ago had warmer seas and little or no ice. Catherine Burgess from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and colleagues studied the chemical analysis of exceptionally well preserved fossils of marine micro-organisms found in 40 million-year-old sediments on a cliff face in New Zealand. Because the fossils are so well preserved, they provide more accurate temperature records, said...
A team of Penn State scientists has discovered a new ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen, and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system. The work...
New evidence could solve the puzzle of why Antarctica went into the deep freezeA team of scientists from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales travelled to Africa to find new evidence of climate change which helps explain some of the mystery surrounding the appearance of the Antarctic ice sheet. Ice sheet formation in the Antarctic is one of the most important climatic shifts in Earth's history. However, previous temperature...
Caused wooly mammoth extinction, global cooling and end of early human Clovis cultureNSF - New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals. The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and their colleagues. James Kennett, a paleoceanographer...
Ancient rocks from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean suggest dramatic climate changes during the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, a time once thought to have been monotonously hot and humid. In this month's Geology, scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research present new evidence that ocean surface temperatures varied as much as 6 degrees Celsius (about 11 degrees Fahrenheit) during the Aptian Epoch of the Cretaceous Period 120 million...
Woods Hole -- Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107°F (42°C) -- about 25°F (14°C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub. The surprisingly high ocean temperatures, the warmest estimates to date for any place on Earth, occurred millions of year ago when carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere were also high, but researchers say they may be an indication that greenhouse gases could heat the...
Boulder, Colo. - The June issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: discovery of 21 Martian river channels and estimates of their discharge and runoff production; evidence for olivine-rich bedrock on Mars; regional dynamics of global climate change; a challenge to the mantle plume hypothesis; constraints on late Neoproterozoic glaciations; new modeling of pyroclastic currents and possibilities for human survival in 79 A.D. Pompeii; the...
Boulder, Colo. - The June issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: discovery of 21 Martian river channels and estimates of their discharge and runoff production; evidence for olivine-rich bedrock on Mars; regional dynamics of global climate change; a challenge to the mantle plume hypothesis; constraints on late Neoproterozoic glaciations; new modeling of pyroclastic currents and possibilities for human survival in 79 A.D. Pompeii; the...
