Compasses at Greenwich are about to do something not observed for 360 years

Credit: JS Pailly

What a time to be alive says ScienceAlert.
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For the first time in centuries, compasses in Greenwich are about to point directly at true north: an epic coincidence of time and magnetism that hasn’t taken place for some 360 years.

This serendipitous occurrence – which is set to occur within the next fortnight – serves as a startling reminder of how Earth’s magnetic north pole is constantly wandering, unlike the fixed ‘true north’ of Earth’s geographic north pole.

The angular difference between those two different points is called magnetic declination, and while the gap might not be something ordinary people spend a great deal of time thinking about, it’s a disparity that can last for centuries at a time.

For hundreds of years now in the UK, due to Earth’s shifting magnetic north pole, declination has been negative, meaning compass needles have been pointing west of true north.

But nothing lasts forever.

Where is Iceberg Alley?

Iceberg alley [credit: U.S. Coast Guard]

On the day Belfast’s Harland & Wolff – famously the builders of the Titanic – goes bust (it seems), let’s look at a question posed by the U.S. Coast Guard…

WHERE IS ICEBERG ALLEY?

The area we call “Iceberg Alley” is located about 250 miles east and southeast of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. Iceberg Alley is usually considered to be that portion of the Labrador Current, that flows southward from Flemish Pass, along the eastern edge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, to the Tail of the Banks. This area extends approximately from 48 to 43 degrees North Latitude at 48 degrees West longitude. Icebergs and sea ice flowing south from Iceberg Alley created the Titanic disaster of 1912. This is the area of the ocean we patrol and monitor most carefully. [bold added]

https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?pageName=iipWhereIsIcebergAlley

What is the latitude and longitude for the Titanic?
Latitude: 41° 46′ North
Longitude: 50° 14′ West
Was Titanic’s last reported position when it sank.

https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_latitude_and_longitude_for_the_Titanic

(For a perhaps surprising comparison, the latitude of Italy’s capital Rome is almost the same.)

Global Warming Boosted The Roman Empire, Then Global Cooling Weakened It

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Climate mythologists trying to re-write history again.

PA Pundits - International

From the team at CFACT ~

A May 31 article in New Scientist, titled “Ancient Roman air pollution caused climate change in Europe,”  is resuscitating the myth that “climate change” brought down the Roman Empire. To the extent global climate forces impacted the health of the empire, it was not generic climate change that harmed the empire. Instead, warming temperatures assisted the rise of the empire and subsequent cooling temperatures weakened it. By and large, climate change only weakens civilization when that change takes the form of cooling temperatures.

The Roman Empire rose and prospered during a time of beneficial global warming. The New Scientist article asserts that the empire played a role in bringing about subsequent cooling temperatures that ultimately contributed to the empire’s downfall. According to the article, soot from Roman fires blocked sunlight and cooled Europe. Deforestation as the empire expanded also cooled temperatures, according to…

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20 Amazing Winter Paintings from the Little Ice Age

An Impression of Winter by Claude Monet

Is the Earth still recovering from the Little Ice Age, a time when many glaciers advanced and recorded sea levels were falling?

The Little Ice Age was a period from about 1300 to 1870 when Europe and North America experienced much colder winters than we do today, says 5 Minute History.

Paintings from the Little Ice Age show us what it was like.

Scientists Drill For “Oldest Ice On Earth” To Unlock Mystery Of Ancient Earth’s Changing Climate

Credit: British Antarctic Survey

The EPICA ice cores clearly showed CO2 lagging behind temperature increases – probably by centuries. But observed effects aren’t supposed to precede alleged causes.

European scientists from 10 countries have spent years scouring the Antarctic ice sheet with one ambition in mind: to drill for the oldest-ever ice core.

Now, they have zeroed in on just the spot says IFL Science.

The team have chosen Little Dome C – one of the coldest, most barren places on Earth. For the next five years, they will drill for a 1.5-million-year-old ice core – a frozen timepiece of Earth’s climatic past.

The Long March to #Brexit: Parliament Square Rally

The 50 core marchers strode through London with thousands of people from all over the country behind them and joined the throng in Parliament Square on March 29th. After great speeches from leavers left and right, the man himself topped the bill with a short but inspiring message to all democrats.

It took us 14 days to march from Sunderland to Westminster. This bloke has given 25 years of his life to the cause of regaining independence for the UK. Spare him 8 minutes of your time.

A deep ocean current shift gives 400-year notice of massive climate change

Credit: NASA – GISS

Showing once again that significant warming and cooling are normal features of the global climate over thousands of years and longer. We could speculate whether this particular research might be linked to the de Vries cycle.

The warm waters of the Gulf Stream flow up along the east coast of North America, moderating the climate of vast areas of northern and western Europe, says Phys.org.

Once the Gulf Stream gets far enough north, the warm waters cool.

As they cool, they sink and start flowing south, forming what scientists call the North Atlantic Deep Water.

Nick Balascio explained that the Gulf Stream/Deep Water system is known as the AMOC, or Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

New geologic evidence supports theory of major cosmic impact event about 12,800 years ago

Impact [image credit: karbalion.com]

This time, unusually, the new Younger Dryas evidence is from way below the equator, which they believe shows that ‘the Younger Dryas climatic onset was an extreme global event’.

When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be, says Phys.org.

“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” Kennett noted. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”

He’s talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning).

Solar input to high latitudes and the global ice volume

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Theorists take another look at the mechanisms that may or may not be important regulators of Earth’s ice ages.

Climate Etc.

by Donald Rapp, Ralf Ellis and Clive Best

A review of the relationship between the solar input to high latitudes and the global ice volume over the past 2.7 million years.

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Study: how the Little Ice Age impacted parts of Australia

Queensland, Australia

The cause(s) of the Little Ice Age is (are) uncertain, but Wikipedia puts forward some ideas with varying degrees of plausibility, including ‘inherent variability in global climate’ (indeed), and ‘decreases in the human population’ (what?). Now some interesting evidence of it has been found in Australia.

A study by University of Adelaide researchers and Queensland Government scientists has revealed what south-east Queensland’s rainfall was like over the last 7000 years – including several severe droughts worse and longer lasting than the 12-year Millennium Drought, reports Phys.org.

The study – published in Scientific Reports—used preserved paper-bark tea tree leaves from North Stradbroke Island’s Swallow Lagoon that have been collecting in the sediment for the past 7700 years.

Prehistoric cave art reveals ancient use of complex astronomy

Image credit: howstuffworks.com

The ancients may even have recorded the supposed ‘Younger Dryas’ comet strike.

Some of the world’s oldest cave paintings have revealed how ancient people had relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy, says Phys.org.

The artworks, at sites across Europe, are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously thought. Instead, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes, analysis suggests.

Greenland ice sheet hides huge ‘impact crater’

Topographic map of Greenland

Something creating a 19-mile wide dent in the Earth’s surface would clearly have been a major strike. If confirmed it would be the most northerly impact crater on Earth.

What looks to be a large impact crater has been identified beneath the Greenland ice sheet, reports BBC News.

The 31km-wide depression came to light when scientists examined radar images of the island’s bedrock.

Investigations suggest the feature was probably dug out by a 1.5km-wide iron asteroid sometime between about 12,000 and three million years ago.

The Retreat of the Gangotri Glacier

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This glacier is one of the largest in the Himalayas and has been retreating since well before the Industrial Revolution, suggesting purely natural causes must be at work.

MalagaBay

If you’ve come to recognise that the future projections of modern climate science are alarmist pseudo-science then it should come as no surprise that the historical hindcasts conjured up by climate science are also pitiful pseudo-science.

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The Magnetic Storm of Halloween 2003

Credit: solen.info

The storm was so strong that the change in magnetic direction could be easily measured on a compass, as this 2013 article explains.

Ghosts and goblins, candle-lit jack o’lanterns and dark haunted houses, ominous screeching and maniacal laughter – these are some of the frightening fantasies we associate with Halloween.

But ten years ago during the Halloween of 2003, while children in costumes paraded door-to-door for treats, the Sun was playing its own tricks with planet Earth, says Directions Magazine.

The consequence: a solar-terrestrial nightmare became a scary reality.

The Halloween Storm

In mid-October 2003, a bundle of concentrated magnetic energy emerged from the Sun’s interior, forming a large sunspot, a site of seething activity. Enormous solar flares soon followed. Then, on October 28, the sunspot abruptly ejected a concentrated mass of electrically conducting solar wind, flinging it out into interplanetary space toward the Earth. Less than a day later, on October 29, a geomagnetic storm was initiated as the solar wind disrupted the Earth’s protective magnetosphere.

Over the next three days, the “Halloween magnetic storm” would evolve and grow to become one of the largest such storms in half a century.

Magnetic storms are global phenomena, and their effects can be easily seen around the world. During the Halloween storm, for example, magnetic direction in Alaska quickly changed by more than 20 degrees. In other words, the storm was so large that it could be measured with a simple compass.

The Halloween magnetic storm also produced spectacular aurora, with green phantom “northern lights” seen as far south as Texas and Florida.

The Impacts of this Storm

The USGS network of magnetic observatories monitored activity from the Halloween storm in collaboration with international partners. The storm played tricks on technological systems around the world, which scientists continue to analyze even today.

Continued here.

See also: The Halloween Storms: When Solar Events Spooked the Skies | GPS World

How climatic changes toppled the ancient megacity of Angkor

Angkor Wat [image credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen @ Wikipedia]

What might the ‘abrupt climatic changes’ described here be due to?

The city may have been overstressed by climatic changes, leading to its rapid abandonment, says Discover magazine.

Angkor, one of the most significant archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, was a thriving metropolis at the center of the Khmer Empire in the 13th century. Then its inhabitants suddenly left town.

Now, researchers find abrupt climatic changes and vulnerable infrastructure led to the city’s demise.

Geologists reveal ancient connection between England and France

The research includes an animation which explains ‘how three ancient land masses collided to form the British Isles’.

Scientists have for centuries believed that England, Wales and Scotland were created by the merger of Avalonia and Laurentia more than 400 million years ago, says EurekAlert.

However, geologists based at the University of Plymouth now believe that a third land mass – Armorica – was also involved in the process.

The findings are published in Nature Communications and follow an extensive study of mineral properties at exposed rock features across Devon and Cornwall.

They reveal a clear boundary running across the two counties, with areas north of it sharing their geological roots with the rest of England and Wales but everything south being geologically linked to France and mainland Europe.

Among other things, scientists believe the research explains the abundance of tin and tungsten in the far South West of England – metals also found in Brittany and other areas of mainland Europe, but not so evident in the rest of the UK.

The research’s lead author, Lecturer in Igneous Petrology Dr Arjan Dijkstra, said: “This is a completely new way of thinking about how Britain was formed. It has always been presumed that the border of Avalonia and Armorica was beneath what would seem to be the natural boundary of the English Channel. But our findings suggest that although there is no physical line on the surface, there is a clear geological boundary which separates Cornwall and south Devon from the rest of the UK.”

Continued here.

Scientists find evidence for early planetary shake-up

NASA mission to Jupiter’s
trojan asteroids

Could evidence from a specific binary asteroid pair upset existing planetary theories? ‘The Jupiter trojans, commonly called Trojan asteroids or just Trojans, are a large group of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.’ – Wikipedia. There are over a million of these, inhabiting two oval-shaped zones based around what are known as the Lagrangian points L4 and L5 of Jupiter’s orbit (see animation below).

Scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) studied an unusual pair of asteroids and discovered that their existence points to an early planetary shake-up in our solar system.

These bodies, called Patroclus and Menoetius [see flyby 6 in the graphic], are targets of NASA’s upcoming Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids. They are around 70 miles wide and orbit around each other as they collectively circle the Sun.

Tim Ball: Canada Must Get Out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Tim Ball, head of CLEXIT Canada writes:

 I am proud to be the Canadian representative for the climate exit (CLEXIT) movement. Canada has more culpability than any other nation in creating and perpetuating the deception. It is not hyperbole to say that Canada was central to creating and mobilizing the false claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The idea that humans were causing runaway global warming originated with the Club of Rome. Formed in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it expanded on the Malthusian idea that the population would outgrow the food supply. The expansion was that world population would outgrow all resources. They made three major assumptions.

• The demand for resources would increase every year because the population is increasing every year.
• Developed nations increase the demand by using resources at a much greater rate than developing nations.
• More nations are changing from developing to developed and accelerating demand.

They produced a few books and reports to substantiate the claims about population and demand. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb garnered enormous attention. Less well read but still influential was the 1972 book Limits to Growth by Meadows et al. It used a very primitive computer program that started with two components. The known volume of a resource and the current rate of use. Then, using a simple linear trend, it projected the point at which the resource would run out. It also projected the point at which the volume of the resource use peaked. Another book published in 1977, Ecoscience, Population, Resources, and Environment, influenced policy for a long time because of Paul Ehrlich’s co-author John Holdren. He later became Science Advisor in the Obama White House.

Harry Wexler: Father of weather satellites

Tiros 1 instruments [credit: NOAA]

These are extracts from an ESA article. In 1954 British science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke wrote to Wexler promoting satellite ideas. In 1960 after years of work and lobbying the first weather satellite was launched.

Wexler was a man of vision, ready to face danger and to give his all to collecting useful data.

He was the first scientist to deliberately fly into a hurricane and also participated in polar expeditions.

His was the mind behind the very first meteorology satellite and even before it reached orbit, he was already dreaming of a global network of satellites to watch the weather worldwide.
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[He] gained a PhD in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939.

An ancient mystery henge has appeared in ‘Once in a Lifetime’ discovery in Ireland

Newgrange UNESCO World Heritage Site

The story of an amazing chance discovery by amateur drone enthusiasts at the UNESCO world heritage site near Newgrange in Ireland this week.

“What the f*** is that?”

It materialised out of almost nowhere, reports ScienceAlert.

Thousands of years after disappearing from human sight and knowledge, an ancient ‘henge’ site has been discovered hidden within the archaeological landscape of Ireland’s Brú na Bóinne.