"Fossils Reveal Much Warmer Antarctic in Recent Past"
FOXNews (July 23, 2008)
"A college student's new discovery of fossils collected in the East Antarctic suggests that the frozen polar cap was once a much balmier place.
"The well-preserved fossils of ostracods, a type of small crustacean, came from the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica's Transantarctic Mountains and date from about 14 million years ago. The fossils were a rare find, showing all of the ostracods' soft anatomy in 3-D...."
Okay: 14 million years ago probably isn't your idea of "recent past," but we're looking at geological time scales here. It looks like Earth cooled off, a lot, about 14 million years back - with catastrophic effects on Antarctica's ecosystem.
This means global warming is myth?
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ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say myth: but this Antarctic finding indicates that there was a whacking great global cooling about 14 million years back.
At this moment, it's warming up. And, we're worried about global warming.
When I was growing up, Earth's temperatures, overall, were going down. I remember the scary articles about how we were facing an impending ice age.
And, I live in Minnesota: we have Minnesota warming and Minnesota cooling on a roughly 365 day cycle.
This may be The End of the World, but I wouldn't count on it.
By the way: One thing that I've learned, since getting interested in dinosaurs as a pre-teen, is that only one thing hasn't changed over the last several hundred million years here: And that's that things change.
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