The Zealandia Switch : Missing Link in Big Natural Climate Shifts?
The Southern Hemisphere may be the missing link in answering longstanding questions about how ice ages wax and wane, according to a new study. There, say researchers, complex interactions among the westerly wind system, the Southern Ocean and the tropical Pacific can trigger rapid global changes in atmospheric temperature. The mechanism, dubbed the Zealandia Switch, relates to the position of the Southern Hemisphere westerly wind belt the strongest wind system on Earth and the continental masses of the southwest Pacific Ocean around New Zealand. The researchers suggest it could again play a role, though not necessarily a predictable one, as humans push the planet into a warmer state.
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By Kevin Krajick
In 1966, U.S. Army scientists drilled through nearly a mile of ice in northwestern Greenland and pulled up a 15-foot-long core of sediment from the bottom. The sample, abandoned and largely forgotten in a series of freezers for decades, was accidentally rediscovered in 2017. Researchers who later examined it were stunned to find it contained not just the usual sand and rock found under glacial ice, but well-preserved remains of twigs and leaves the first discovery of onetime plant life under this apparently long-frozen part of the world.
In a new study published this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from a dozen institutions say the discovery indicates that most or all of Greenland’s ice melted one or more times within about the last million years, allowing vegetation or even forests to grow. The finding strongly bolsters a 2016 study of bedrock retrieved from the bottom of an even deeper core that indicated the ice had la
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