Earth’s Climate Could Experience Another Sudden Ice Age
8 December 2009 | Green News | 1 Comment
The Earth is very old – about 4.5 billion years and counting. In this time it has experienced numerous events, we humans would call catastrophes, which have brought it to the present shape and form. There is no doubt in the scientists mind that those kinds of events will soon appear again.
About 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere had experienced a dramatic temperature drop that lasted more than 1,300 years. In the period called Younger Dryas or better known as the “Big Freeze” ,evidence from the latest geological studies, show that it was caused by the pouring of a massive amount of fresh water, a quantity larger than all of North America’s Great Lakes together, into the Atlantic Ocean. It actually all started when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America “overflew” and disturbed the circulation of warmer water in the North Atlantic, which eventually caused the temperatures to drop, literally producing an Ice Age.
The first studies performed in Greenland’s ice sheets suggested that this blunt temperature shift happened over a course of ten years or more. But latest research come now to disprove that assertion. Scientists believe now that it needed only a few months, two years at most to come such a sudden cool-down. Isotope biogeochemist William Patterson at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and his colleagues have discovered this after studying an ancient mud core from lake Lough Monreach in Ireland. It is after meticulously analysing the mud, which represented, in layers, the course of that place’s history, that they came to this conclusion. Other surprisingly results show that the climate and lake recovery took far more than the evidence from Greenland suggested, namely about 100-200 years.
Thinking about the future, Patterson is pretty convinced that this kind of a “Ice Age” scenario will sometime strike the Earth again, and it could happen just as sudden as it did before.
Tags: Big Freeze, climate, cool-down, Earth, Greenland, Ice Age, scientist, sudden drop, temperature drop, William Petterson, Younger Dryas
What a great resource!