Last ice age froze Europe in a few months (Tuesday, November 17, 2009)
It only took six months to plunge Europe's warm climate into the last ice age, according to new research.
Previous research had suggested it took some 10 years for the slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread southward and plunge the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze 12,800 years ago.
The new findings suggest "it would have been very sudden for those alive at the time," said William Patterson, a geological sciences professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, who carried out the research. "It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months."
To conduct the research, Patterson scraped mud deposits from a lake in western Ireland and studied each 0.5-millimeter-thick layer. The mud indicated that the temperatures had abruptly chilled, with the lake's plants and animals rapidly dying over just a few months.
The finding reinforces a series of studies that suggest that the Earth's climate is highly unstable and can flip between warm and cold very quickly under the right conditions (Jonathan Leake, London Times, Nov. 15)
Second, check out this Letter to the Editor in the Guardian responding to the article they ran the other day discussing how the IEA has been overestimating oil reserves. The author has been involved in exploration and oil reserve research for years and has some great insights.
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