When the global climate has the hiccups – ‘repeated rapid increases in temperature’

Promoters of a current ‘climate crisis’ often call modern warming and/or events within it, ‘unprecedented’. However, compared to events like this: “A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life” [explains Prof.], not much is presently going on. Climate variability can happen in different ways, and repeat over long timescales.
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In recent geological history, the so-called Quaternary period, there have been repeated ice ages and warm periods, says Science Daily.

Researchers are able to determine past climate variability from the composition of climate records. In the case of the last glacial period 100,000 years ago, ice cores from Greenland in particular provide researchers with detailed data.

For example, Greenland ice cores show that there were repeated rapid increases in temperature.

“We are talking about increases of 5 to 10 degrees within 30 to 40 years on average in the case of Europe. A Neanderthal would have experienced increases in the average temperature of several degrees over the course of their life,” explains Prof. Dominik Fleitmann, Professor of Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel.

He calls the phenomena “climate hiccups.”

These Dansgaard-Oeschger events are well documented for the last glacial period, but the climate records from Greenland only cover the last 120,000 years.

It was therefore previously unknown whether these Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period 135,000 to 190,000 years ago.

Frederick Held, a PhD candidate in Fleitmann’s research group, was able to show that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period using isotopic measurements on stalagmites.

He is the lead author of the study which was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The North Atlantic as the source of change

The stalagmites examined originate from the Sofular Cave in Turkey, which is located in a region that is very sensitive to climate change.

The researchers therefore refer to it as a key region, as it is influenced by the winds of the North Atlantic and the Black Sea is just a few kilometers away.

“We used the isotopic composition in the stalagmites to determine the moisture sources from which they are formed — the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic,” explains Frederick Held.

For the first time, the evaluations carried out on the stalagmites from the Sofular Cave have proven that Dansgaard-Oeschger events also occurred during the penultimate glacial period.

“It was previously unknown whether these relatively brief temperature events actually happened in earlier glacial periods,” states Held.

However, they occurred less frequently in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one: “The temperature peaks are twice as far apart from one another, meaning there were longer cold phases between them.”

These temperature fluctuations originate in the North Atlantic, as the circulation of the ocean is a global conveyor belt for heat and can sometimes be stronger and sometimes weaker.

“For example, the circulation affects the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean, which, in turn, impacts the balance of heat in the Northern Hemisphere and air flows and rainfall,” explains Held.

He states that weakened circulation also reduces the quantity of CO2 which the ocean absorbs from the atmosphere.

These ocean currents were different in the penultimate glacial period than in the last one, which explains the different intervals between the Dansgaard-Oeschger events.

This shows that not all glacial periods are the same and not all warm periods are the same.
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The geologist also hopes to clarify any outstanding questions by means of additional analyses. “For example, we do not yet know whether the increases in temperature were periodic or stochastic, in other words random.”

Full article here.

Image: Greenland ice core [credit: K. Makinson @ Wikipedia]

Is Iceland entering a new volcanic era?

Scientists think there’s some evidence of a centuries-long periodic pattern or cycle, but aren’t sure what it is or what determines the length of it. The graphic shows the most recent two of the five marked phases are west of the earlier ones, plus some apparent north-east to south-west alignments, but otherwise it’s open to intepretation.
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This week, Iceland woke up to yet another day of fire, as towering fountains of lava lit up the dark morning sky, says BBC News.

This time the evacuated town of Grindavik was spared, but the molten rock still wrought havoc – engulfing a pipe that provides heat and hot water to thousands living in the area and cutting off a road to the Blue Lagoon tourist attraction.

It is the third short-lived eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula since December 2023 and the sixth since 2021. But scientists think this is just the start of a period of volcanic activity that could last for decades or even centuries.

So what is going on?

Net zero setback: UK decommissioned onshore gas field fails hydrogen storage safety check – ‘numerous barriers’

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

Sounds like game over for that site. Back to the drawing board for the climate obsessed UK government.
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A study exploring the potential of a decommissioned gas field in Scotland as a major hydrogen store has highlighted concerns over potential leaks and recommended that it shouldn’t be used, says the University of Aberdeen (via Phys.org).

Research led by Professor John Underhill at the University of Aberdeen and Malcolm Butler at the UK Onshore Geophysical Library (UKOGL) concluded that the Cousland gas field in Midlothian fails to meet the criteria for safe subsurface storage.

The site near Dalkeith in Midlothian, which was decommissioned in the 1960s, has been highlighted by other academic studies as a potential contender for large-scale hydrogen storage to help meet national net zero ambitions.

Himalayan Glaciers ‘fight back’ with cooling mechanism, researchers find

Himalayan glaciers [image credit: earth.com]

Time to dial down some over-excitable climate claims perhaps. The actual mechanism has been observed elsewhere before, but ‘not all downslope winds are katabatic‘. Effects can vary according to local conditions.
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Himalayan Glaciers fight back to preserve themselves, but for how long? — asks Eurekalert.

An international team of researchers, co-led by Professor Francesca Pellicciotti of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), explains a stunning phenomenon: rising global temperatures have led Himalayan glaciers to increasingly cool the air in contact with the ice surface.

The ensuing cold winds might help cool the glaciers and preserve the surrounding ecosystems. The results, found across the Himalayan range, were published in Nature Geoscience.

‘Time’s finally up’: Impending Iceland eruption is part of centuries-long volcanic pulse

Lava fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula [image credit: Vincent van Zeijst @ Wikipedia]

The headline obviously raises the question of the origin of such a pulse and of its suggested frequency. On the other hand a damp squib (from a spectator point of view) can’t be ruled out entirely at this stage, although some of the cracks already appearing on the surface do look quite large and other signs are ominous.
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Iceland’s potentially imminent eruption in the Reykjanes Peninsula is part of a 1,000-year cycle of volcanic activity that will likely cause eruptions for centuries, scientists say.

“Time’s finally up,” Edward W. Marshall, a researcher at the University of Iceland’s Nordic Volcanological Center, told LiveScience in an email. “We can get ready for another few hundred years of eruptions on the Reykjanes.”

Seismic activity began increasing in the south of the peninsula in October, with hundreds of earthquakes recorded there each day. On Nov. 10, authorities evacuated the town of Grindavík, with experts warning a volcanic eruption could take place in just days.

Hexagons on Mars: New Evidence of an Environment Conducive to the Emergence of Life

Self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover [image credit: NASA/JPL @ Wikipedia]

Remote control geology at work.
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Using data from NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists have discovered patterns on Mars that provide evidence of a cyclical climate similar to that of Earth.

This major discovery opens up new prospects for research into the origin of life, says SciTechDaily.

The results of the study, which was conducted by scientists at the CNRS, Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, with the participation of CNES, were published on August 9, 2023, in the journal Nature.

The biggest myth about fossil fuels and dinosaurs, debunked by science

Credit: fuelfix.com

In case you weren’t quite sure…
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Is your car really powered by dinosaurs? – asks BBC Science Focus.

Most oil reserves were formed between 65 and 252 million years ago. While this does overlap with the ‘dinosaur times’, oil is a marine sediment made of the remains of algae and plankton.

Skeletons of prehistoric reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (neither of which count as dinosaurs) have been found in the same geological layers as oil and they may have contaminated the oil deposit.

Rocks beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet reveal ‘surprising past’- i.e. natural variation

Thwaites Glacier [image credit: NASA]

Why the surprise? Natural climate cycles are well documented in Earth’s history. Their ‘many glaciers’ turn out to mostly mean the area around Thwaites Glacier (aka the Doomsday Glacier), known to be affected by subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal “hotspots”, which obviously have nothing to do with the current obsession over atmospheric trace gases.
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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is shrinking, with many glaciers across the region retreating and melting at an alarming rate, claims the British Antarctic Survey @ Phys.org.

However, this was not always the case according to new research published last month (April 28) in The Cryosphere. [Talkshop comment – self-evident].

A team of scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), including two researchers from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), discovered that the ice sheet near Thwaites Glacier was thinner in the last few thousand years than it is today.

This unexpected find shows that glaciers in the region were able to regrow following earlier shrinkage.

Study: ‘Warm ice age’ changed climate cycles

Credit: Robert A. Rohde @ Wikipedia

Re. the well-known 100,000 year problem, the researchers propose new climate-related evidence for ‘the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today’.
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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a “warm ice age” permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth, says Phys.org.

Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded.

A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection.

Kill dates of black mosses are archives of Antarctic glacier history

Credit: coolantarctica.com

Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
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Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.

When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.

The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.

What Climate Crisis? A Primer On Earth’s Turbulent Climatic Past

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

Blinkered climate obsessives, from protesters to governments, need to wise up about their pet topic. Professor Ian Plimer offers some assistance to trace gas worriers.
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For more than 80 percent of the time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice, says Ian Plimer at Spectator AU (via Climate Change Dispatch.

We live in unusual times when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight.

The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 percent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.

Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa, and India.

Bering Land Bridge formed surprisingly late during last ice age, say researchers

Credit: alaskapublic.org

A researcher said: “Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” calling into question some long-held ideas. A professor connected to the study commented: “These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect.” Well, fancy that. The commentary notes that ‘global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume’. In short, the ice sheets grew faster than scientists had thought.
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Princeton scientists found that the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of land that once connected Asia to Alaska, emerged far later during the last ice age than previously thought, says Eurekalert. 

The unexpected findings shorten the window of time that humans could have first migrated from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge. 

The findings also indicate that there may be a less direct relationship between climate and global ice volume than scientists had thought, casting into doubt some explanations for the chain of events that causes ice age cycles.

The study was published on December 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This result came totally out of left field,” said Jesse Farmer, postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and co-lead author on the study. “As it turns out, our research into sediments from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean told us not only about past climate change but also one of the great migrations in human history.”

Insight into ice age cycles

During the periodic ice ages over Earth’s history, global sea levels drop as more and more of Earth’s water becomes locked up in massive ice sheets.

At the end of each ice age, as temperatures increase, ice sheets melt and sea levels rise. These ice age cycles repeat throughout the last 3 million years of Earth’s history, but their causes have been hard to pin down.

By reconstructing the history of the Arctic Ocean over the last 50,000 years, the researchers revealed that the growth of the ice sheets — and the resulting drop in sea level — occurred surprisingly quickly and much later in the last glacial cycle than previous studies had suggested.

“One implication is that ice sheets can change more rapidly than previously thought,” Farmer said.

During the last ice age’s peak of the last ice age, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, the low sea levels exposed a vast land area that extended between Siberia and Alaska known as Beringia, which included the Bering Land Bridge. In its place today is a passage of water known as the Bering Strait, which connects the Pacific and Arctic Oceans.

Based on records of estimated global temperature and sea level, scientists thought the Bering Land Bridge emerged around 70,000 years ago, long before the Last Glacial Maximum.

But the new data show that sea levels became low enough for the land bridge to appear only 35,700 years ago. This finding was particularly surprising because global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume.

“Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” Farmer said. For example, the change in ice volume may have been the direct result of changes in the intensity of sunlight that struck the ice surface over the summer.

“These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect,” said Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University and Farmer’s postdoctoral advisor.

“Our next goal is to extend this record further back in time to see if the same tendencies apply to other major ice sheet changes. The scientific community will be hungry for confirmation.”

Full article here.
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Study: The Bering Strait was flooded 10,000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum

What may be the largest source of abiotic methane gas on Earth

Natural gas flare [credit: Wikipedia]

abiotic — Not associated with or derived from living organisms. Calling methane, aka natural gas, a ‘fossil fuel’ is shown by geological evidence to be inaccurate.
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Methane (CH4), the chief constituent of natural gas, is one of the most widely used “clean” fuels, says Phys.org.

Although methane is usually considered to originate from organic matter, recently, more and more evidence shows that methane can be produced by abiotic processes.

In a recent paper published in National Science Review (NSR), Professor Lifei Zhang’s team from Peking University demonstrated that large amounts of methane gas can form during prograde metamorphism in a cold subduction zone, evidenced by the massive CH4-rich fluid inclusions in eclogites from Western Tianshan, China.

Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds

This schematic shows the relationship between the different physical and chemical processes that make up the carbonate-silicate cycle. In the upper panel, the specific processes are identified, and in the lower panel, the feedbacks associated are shown; green arrows indicate positive coupling, while yellow arrows indicate negative coupling [image credit: Gretashum @ Wikipedia]

There’s always been a carbonate–silicate cycle, which Wikipedia declares ‘is the primary control on carbon dioxide levels over long timescales’. Warmists have shoe-horned this into their atmospheric theories, as we can see from the appearance of ‘greenhouse effect’ in the graphic above. Carry on, Earth.
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The Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation, says Eurekalert.

And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.

Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.

Just how does it accomplish this?

Faster in the Past: New seafloor images of West Antarctic Ice Sheet upend understanding of Thwaites Glacier retreat

Some like to call it the Doomsday Glacier. The research results are probably open to a variety of interpretations, in terms of predictions. But we’re told that whatever is being observed at present is by no means exceptional, making attempts at attribution of its ever-changing condition to human activity even more problematic. Volcanic activity is an obvious confounding factor here.
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The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — about the size of Florida — has been an elephant in the room for scientists trying to make global sea level rise predictions, says Science Daily.

This massive ice stream is already in a phase of fast retreat (a “collapse” when viewed on geological timescales) leading to widespread concern about exactly how much, or how fast, it may give up its ice to the ocean.

The potential impact of Thwaites’ retreat is spine-chilling: a total loss of the glacier and surrounding icy basins could raise sea level from three to 10 feet.

‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules

Seabed mining

The ‘energy transition’ is supposed to replace thousands of coal-fired power stations and over a hundred million barrels of oil per year, amongst other fuels like gas and wood, in the name of an invented ‘climate crisis’. Not going to happen on the scale required, even if this new supply of minerals were to become available – with the aid of fossil fuel powered machinery. All that mining will, or would be, waste product one day.
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A growing number of countries are demanding more time to decide on rules that would allow companies to mine the deep seabed for minerals needed to manufacture batteries for the energy transition, says Climate Change News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

Ancient ‘megafloods’ tilted the very direction of Earth’s crust, scientists find

Image credit: NASA

Ice age flooding, recreated in models.
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Earth’s last major ice age locked up gargantuan amounts of water in vast glaciers, says Science Alert.

Once they melted, it was a spectacle to behold as tremendous floods gouged channels into the face of the planet.

The remnants of one of the largest of these ancient deluges are still visible in eastern Washington, in an area now known as the Channeled Scablands.

For a long time, geologists have been struggling to understand the dynamic properties of these floods, until a recent key insight was made.

These ancient glaciers were so large and heavy, they actually tilted Earth’s crust beneath them – when weight was released due to melting, the land would have moved too, changing the course of the megaflood.

Using modeling of ancient megafloods, researchers decided to test whether glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) – deflections in the crust as heavy chunks of ice form and melt – would affect the routing flow and erosion in two prominent Scabland tracks.

“We used relatively simple, yet plausible, numerical experiments to test whether GIA could have had a substantial impact on flood routing and erosion for two major scabland tracts, Cheney-Palouse and Telford-Crab Creek,” write the authors of the study.

“To this end, we modeled GIA to reconstruct the topography of the Channeled Scabland at different times during the period of Ice Age flooding.”

Up until now, reconstructions of ancient megaflood routing had investigated how other variables would affect them – things like erosion and the movement of sediment, the three-dimensional mechanics of the environment, or how ice dams break, for example.

But they would also base these reconstructions on present-day topography, approximating how past landscapes may have looked.

“People have been looking at high water marks and trying to reconstruct the size of these floods, but all of the estimates are based on looking at the present-day topography,” said lead author Tamara Pico, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

Geologists realized that the effects melting glaciers were having on Earth’s crust were also likely playing a role in the routing and behavior of these megafloods.

“GIA caused crustal deformation in the Channeled Scabland with rates up to 10 millimeters per year, orders of magnitude above regional tectonic uplift rates and, therefore, may have influenced flood routing,” note the authors.

“The course of ancient, glacial outburst floods was likely influenced by glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA), and reconstructing these events informs our understanding of how floods shape landscapes on Earth and Mars,” they added.
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The researchers believe the deformation of Earth’s crust due to the expanding and contacting of the ice sheets would have altered the elevation of the landscape by hundreds of meters over this period.

Moving forward, the researchers want to simulate past megaflood events which incorporate the multiple factors that determine their routing.

However, understanding the important role that ice age crustal deformation plays during flood routing and erosion in these ancient megafloods is a step in the right direction.

Full article here.

Tug of sun, moon could be driving plate motions on ‘imbalanced’ Earth, suggest researchers

Credit: reference.com

Plate tectonics has always been good for a science controversy or two. This one throws some solar-planetary spice into the mix, putting a focus on the Earth-Moon barycentre.
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A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle, says Phys.org.

The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of tectonic plates is related to convection currents in the Earth’s mantle.

Convection involves buoyant rise of heated fluids, which Hofmeister and her colleagues argue does not apply to solid rocks.

They argue that force, not heat, moves large objects.

Climate-friendly farming: Greenland’s melting glaciers offer an answer

Greenland drink break [image credit: leisurelylifestyle.com]

As a bonus in today’s climate obsessed times, carbon credits could come into play for farmers to sell with this discovery. Even Danish brewers can benefit. Why fear glacier melt if it makes life better?
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On a shore near Greenland’s capital Nuuk, a local scientist points to a paradox emerging as the island’s glaciers retreat: one of the most alarming consequences of global warming could deliver a way to limit its effects, says Reuters (via Yahoo News).

“It’s a kind of wonder material,” says Minik Rosing, a native Greenlander, referring to the ultra-fine silt deposited as the glaciers melt.

Known as glacial rock flour, the silt is crushed to nano-particles by the weight of the retreating ice sheet, which deposits roughly one billion tonnes of it on the world’s largest island per year.

Professor Minik Rosing and his team at the University of Copenhagen have established the nutrient-rich mud boosts agricultural output when applied to farmland and absorbs carbon dioxide from the air in the process.

Earth Tipped on Its Side 84 Million Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia]

The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of the mineral magnetite, offer some of the most convincing evidence yet of true polar wander in the Late Cretaceous – and it may help settle a scientific debate that’s been going on for decades.