Alpine melt reveals ancient life

[Adsos Letter]

Source: BBC News

Melting alpine glaciers are revealing fascinating clues to Neolithic life in the high mountains. And, as a conference of archaeologists and climatologists meeting in the Swiss capital Berne has been discussing, the finds are also providing key indicators to climate change.

What fascinates scientists about the age of the finds is that they correspond to times when climate specialists have already calculated the Earth was going through an especially warm period, caused by fluctuations in the orbital pattern of the Earth in relation to the Sun.

"But what we do know is that the climate has fluctuated throughout history; in the past the driving force for the changes was the Earth's orbital pattern, now the driving force is green house gas emissions."

"The fact that we still find these 5,000-year-old pieces of leather tells us they were protected by the ice all this time, and that the glaciers have never been smaller than in the year 2003 and the years following."



Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7580294.stm

[mdmc]

1. intersting

[Auggie]

6. Fascinating, too

Reminds me of a project I worked on years ago for a natural spring water called Trinity Springs out of Idaho. The water was over 10,000 years old -- untouched by radiation and air pollutants. It took 5000 years for the water to filter down through the earth and another 5000 to come back up.

[mdmc]

8. have you ever seen the show Northern Exposure?

there was an episode where ancient water is tapped and makes the males feminine and vice versa...

[AngryAmish]

2. Maybe that is why Hannibal was able to cross the Alps with elephants

I'm no climate scientist but I am unsure that the warming is all bad...that said one of the interesting thins is when oak trees and the like are found underneath glaciers. That is good proof that the glacial areas were not always that cold. But it is localized and not proof of general warming in the past.

Anyway, this sort of stuff is just a few data points. But I find neolithic man fascinating. Cool article.

[SpiralHawk]

3. Climate instability is what's bad

too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, or just too damn stormy - causes problems.

[TechBear_Seattle]

4. There really is no thing as too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, etc

At best, there is only "hotter than it has been in a while", "colder than it used to be around here," "rainier now than our records show it used to be," etc.

You might say that the Saraha Desert is too hot or the Gobi Desert is too dry, or the deciduous rain forests on the Olympic Penninsula is too wet or Antarctica is too cold, but such statements would be incorrect: these areas are perfectly suited for the life that currently exists there. As climate changes, life in these areas will adapt (even though individual species may go extinct.)

The only problem is that we humans have built infrastructure, in some cases over thousands of years, that cannot be easily moved or adapted. But that is our fault, not the changing climate's. Global climate change is old hat; it has been happening long before humans were around and it will continue long after we have either gone extinct or evolved into something else.

[Barrett808]

10. Atmospheric and ocean chemistry have never changed as rapidly as now.

In the entire history of the planet. Some opportunistic species will survive, but entire ecosystems are unraveling before our eyes -- they cannot adapt to these immensely rapid changes.

[TechBear_Seattle]

22. I don't think that is true

The sudden release of methane into the atmosphere is the prime suspect behind the Permian-Triassic Extiction some 251 million ago, which wiped out an estimated 96% of marine life on the planet and 70% of land life.

A meteorite is believed to be responsible for the Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction 65 million years ago, which killed about half of the life on the planet, including the dinosaurs. You can't get much more rapid than a meteor impact.

There is also evidence that the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events occured rapidly (in terms of geological time) about 444 million years ago.

[Barrett808]

23. Indeed, but even during the PT event, the carbon was emitted over many thousands of years

The same goes for the PETM. We are emitting as much carbon in a few centuries as was released over 10,000 years during the PETM. It seems the wheels come off the biosphere at around 1000ppm CO2 -- we're currently north of 385ppm, and increasing ~2ppm / year.

Ocean chemistry is changing faster than at any time is the last 650,000 years, with ghastly effects on calcareous organisms and carbonate platforms (coral reefs).

Of course, the climate change caused by the KT event was sudden, but not caused by carbon releases.

[aquart]

29. Uh, they thawed a mammoth who was flash frozen eating buttercups.

You don't wanna know how fast it can come.

[Barrett808]

30. There's no doubt that planetary climate can change very rapidly

Which makes it even more imperative that we stop changing the atmospheric and ocean chemistry in the profound and accelerating ways that we are.

[SpiralHawk]

26. Is this what the Bible says?

Or is it what Rush says?

Either way, it does a convenient job of diverting attention from the reality of the Holcene Period, as post #9 points out.

Pretty damn slick, but still ineffective hogwash.

[TechBear_Seattle]

32. You can find patterns even in completely random white noise

But that has nothing at all to do with what I posted. Would you assert that Greenland is too cold? If the glaciers melted and Greenland could be productively farmed by humans, wouldn't that mean it was too warm? What, then, of the Amazon Basin?

My point is that life adapts to the climate. Greenland is not too cold for polar bears and Inuit; the Amazon Basin is not too hot or too wet for the people and life there; the Gobi Desert is very well suited for the creatures and plants which evolved into that ecological niche despite the fact that you probably would not want to set up a resort there.

[Barrett808]

33. I'd modify your statement thusly: Life adapts to climate *eventually*

When climate change is too rapid, ecosystems unravel, and it takes millions of years to fill the niches left by extinct species. For example, it took several million years for biodiversity to start recovering after the PT extinction event.

To use your example, the Arctic is already too warm for polar bears; they are doomed in the wild. The oceans are already becoming too warm, acidic, and nutrient-loaded for corals; whole reefs are dying in extraordinary numbers. A few opportuinistic species are thriving in the voids: anaerobes and jellyfish. Existing ocean ecosystems simply can't survive with all the human-caused stressors; we're returning the oceans to their primordial state, before complex multicellular life.

[ben_meyers]

5. Has the climate ever been "stable"?

Climate change is just that, change, instability. It's only our definition of whats "normal" that makes some people think that the world is coming to an end.

[Barrett808]

9. Yes: The current Holocene epoch has been remarkably stable...

...allowing humans to create agriculture and civilization. But we're doing our best to destabilize this Golden Age.

[ben_meyers]

13. That has been one of the latest tactics, "oh, it's never happened

so fast before." But that is simply not true either. I've posted this article before and it seems to be at odds with that theory.

Stone Age settlement found in English Channel

Erosion on the floor of the English Channel is revealing the remains of a busy Stone Age settlement, from a time when Europe and Britain were still linked by land, a team of archaeologists says.

The site, just off the Isle of Wight, dates back 8,000 years, not long before melting glaciers filled in the Channel and likely drove the settlement's last occupants north to higher ground.

"This is the only site of its kind in the United Kingdom," said Garry Momber, director of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology, which led the recent excavations. "It is important because this is the period when modern people were blossoming, just coming out of the end of the Ice Age, living more like we do today in the valleys and lowlands."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20215343/

[Barrett808]

17. Deglaciations do tend to be rapid, but I'm talking about atmospheric and ocean chemistry

We're dumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere at a rate that's greater than either the Permian-Triassic boundary or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

[ben_meyers]

20. So either "deglaciations" didn't occur in the past

or they happened independent human interaction. What's the difference? Are you suggesting that we can do something to stop or even delay it?

[Barrett808]

21. Several deglaciations have occurred, long before humans appeared.

However, the current melt event is happening independently of Milankovitch variation, and is driven by human CO2 emissions.

At this point, the only thing we can do to avert total meldown of the cryosphere is to cap carbon emissions and develop some sort of sequestration technology. That's a tall order.

[ben_meyers]

24. So 8-10000 years ago the North Sea and English Channel

flooded and 5000 years ago the glaciers in the Alps retreated. Doesn't that suggest that your Milankovitch variation is an interesting theory that doesn't hold? I detect a completely different pattern and maybe it's just time again. Or is it all just settled science not to be questioned. Who am I to believe, your theories or my own lying eyes.

[Barrett808]

25. The last deglaciation happened right on time, according to Milankovitch

We're about due for the (slow) onset of another ice age, but what's different this time is the enormous CO2 excursion caused by humans digging up reduced carbon and oxidizing it. This overwhelms the natural forcing, so Milankovitch won't save us from an imminent hothouse climate.

[Sequoia]

27. Hannibal. That's a good point you have there.

[aquart]

28. You really need to do more reading on the die-offs.

And tropical diseases.

[malakai2]

34. Sure it's not all bad...

GW IS bad, the parts that count anyway. It's an uncontrolled experiment over which the people who are being affected have no control. Nobody on earth can choose not to participate. It will disproportionately, negatively affect the people who are least responsible. It will cost humanity a shocking percentage of existing unstudied biodiversity. There is nothing good about that.

Were is the silver lining? We'll struggle to grow crops in continental interiors, but we'll also be able to plant oak trees high up in the Alps. Doesn't seem equitable to me. We'll lose fertile and heavily populated coastal plains to a rising ocean, but we'll also be able to grow palm trees in New England. Again, not exactly a fair trade. We'll welcome tropical diseases and vectors into what are currently temperate areas, but in exchange we'll be able to walk around a somewhat verdant Greenland without a parka.

Call me crazy, but I like what we have, or at least had before our little experiment got out of hand.

[Barrett808]

35. Word. n/t

[ben_meyers]

7. So they keep it quiet for 5 years and meanwhile the

doom and gloomers run around perpetuating the myth of man made global climate change! Maybe it isn't settled science after all.

FTA

It all started at the end of the long hot summer of 2003, when a Swiss couple, hiking across a melting Schnidejoch, came across a piece of wood that aroused their curiosity.

They took it down with them, and gave it to canton Berne's archaeological department, where careful examination and carbon dating revealed the piece of wood to be an arrow quiver made of birch bark, dating from about 3000 BC.

At first, the news of the find was kept quiet; historians feared treasure hunters on the Schnidejoch as the ice melted. But teams of archaeologists went up, and more and more artefacts were discovered.
The ice has protected the leather for thousands of years

[Nikki Stone1]

11. It sounds like they were trying to protect emerging artifacts

I don't think they were trying to hide global warming.

[ben_meyers]

14. I don't either, but it has worked out that way. n/t

[Lorien]

15. How? 3000 year old ice is melting. n/t

[ben_meyers]

18. Of course it is, that's what ice does when you warm it up.

There is ice older than that melting too, what's the point?

[virtualobserver]

31. your point seems to be.....Hell it's melting anyway, lets turn up the heat and flood the coasts.....

[HopeHoops]

12. FOX EXCLUSIVE - Global warming is GOOD for science!

[ben_meyers]

16. BBC= Fox news? Hadn't looked at it that way before,

but I'll bite...WTF are you talking about?

[Adsos Letter]

19. Thankyou....

I was going to respond, but decided maybe the poster was suggesting the way FOX would spin it.

pretty hard to equate BBC with FOX.

:hi: