Posted on Feb 6, 2019
“Some 115,000 years ago, homo sapiens were still living in bands of hunter gatherers, largely confined to Africa. We still shared the globe with the Neanderthals, although it’s not clear we had met them yet. And though these various hominids didn’t know it,” reports Chris Mooney in today’s Washington Post, “the Earth was coming to the end of a major warm period. It was one that’s quite close to our current climate, but with one major discrepancy — seas at the time were 20 to 30 feet higher.”
During this ancient period, sometimes called the Eemian, the oceans were about as warm as they are today. Last month, intriguing new research emerged suggesting that Northern Hemisphere glaciers have already retreated just as far as they did in the Eemian, driven by dramatic warming in Arctic regions.
“Missing –14 Billion Tons of Antarctica’s Ice”
“Everything is Melting Everywhere” –Arctic Warming Exponentially Faster Than Rest of Planet
Today’s “Planet Earth Report” –Scientists Have Uncovered a Very Scary Climate Change Precedent
The finding, continues Mooney, arose when a team of researchers working on Baffin Island, in northeastern Canada, sampled the remains of ancient plants that had emerged from beneath fast-retreating mountain glaciers. And they found that the plants were very old indeed, and had probably last grown in these spots some 115,000 years ago. That’s the last time the areas were actually not covered by ice, the scientists believe.
“It’s very hard to come up with any other explanation, except that at least in that one area where we’re working … the last century is as warm as any century in the last 115,000 years,” said Gifford Miller, a geologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who led the research on Baffin Island.
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The image above shows the Highway Glacier on Baffin Island, Canada.