Thursday, June 01, 2006

Revisionism on Arctic history

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Arctic's tropical past uncovered

It seems that there is still a lot of new stuff being discovered about the history of the Arctic, and it's all very relevant to how good current models of climate change are.

This part seemed surprising in particular:

"Five hundred thousand years above where the Azolla was found, we found the first drop stones," explained Professor Brinkhuis, who is also a co-author on the third paper which details Arctic ice-formation.

"These are little stones that come from icebergs, icesheets or sea ice. So it must have been cold enough to have ice."

"Before we did this it was thought that the ice field in the Northern hemisphere only began about three million years ago, but now we have pushed that back to 45 million years ago."

That's some major revision of a very major issue (when did the Arctic freeze over?)

No comments: