Latest Younger Dryas Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Climate scientists have long debated whether floodwaters from melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet flowed northwest into the Arctic first, or east via the Gulf of St. Lawrence to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a frigid effect on global climate. This debate concerning the melt, which ushered in the last major cold episode about 12,900 years ago, has been raging for about 30 years. A research team from the University of...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research, led by the University at Buffalo, is examining an important mystery surrounding climate change: How quickly do glaciers melt and grow in response to shifts in temperature. According to the study, published in Science, glaciers on Canada's Baffin Island expanded rapidly during a brief cold snap about 8,200 years ago. This discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that shows ice sheets reacted rapidly in the past to...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Ice samples that profile Greenland glaciers have long been used to give climate scientists historical temperature data, but those samples could be misleading, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers found that the data gathered from the ice cores around Greenland varies greatly from other records of Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the...
A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth. These new data are the latest to strongly...
New Zealand glaciers melted as European glaciers briefly expandedAs the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned.But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up.For the two decades since ice core records revealed simultaneous warming and cooling at opposite ends of the planet during this time period, scientists have looked for an explanation.Results...
Research at the School of Geographical Sciences, Southwest University (SWU) in Chongqing, China-Research, has demonstrated that the record of the Asian Summer Monsoon (ASM) covers the last deglaciation and the early Holocene (from 16.2 to 7.3 ka BP), with an average oxygen isotope resolution of 9 years (issue 53, May 2010 of SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences).Understanding the factors responsible for past climatic changes is a key to understand future climate change. Such climatic changes include...
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...
Did a change in climate or an extraterrestrial impact bring an end to the beasts and people that roamed the Southwest shortly after the last ice age?A team of researchers from the University of Arizona has revisited evidence pointing to a cataclysmic event thought by many scientists to have wiped out the North American megafauna "“ such as mammoths, saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths and Dire wolves "“ along with the Clovis hunter-gatherer culture some 13,000 years ago. The team...
The main cause of a rapid global cooling period, known as the Big Freeze or Younger Dryas - which occurred nearly 13,000 years ago - has been identified thanks to the help of an academic at the University of Sheffield.A new paper, to be published in Nature on April 1, 2010, has identified a mega-flood path across North America which channeled melt-water from a giant ice sheet into the oceans and triggering the Younger Dryas cold snap.The research team, which included Dr Mark Bateman from the...
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...
