The Zealandia Switch : Missing Link in Big Natural Climate Shifts? | Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory columbia.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from columbia.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This floodwater reached heights of perhaps 70 meters
, with a volume of 110,000 cubic meters/second (m
3
/s), similar to that caused by flooding in the River Amazon. Dating these floods has been fundamental to matching them to the advance and retreat of glaciers, and seeing how they relate to the climatic changes of recent millennia, says Alicia Medialdea, a researcher on the CENIEH Geochronology Program.
Glacial recession
The scientists
identified a total of up to 86 catastrophic floods that took place in five phases coinciding with the end of neoglacial periods, when glacial retreat weakens the ice. Another period of major floods was about 6,000 years ago, with flows of up to 20,000 m
Credit: TiPES/HP
Every late winter and early spring, huge dust storms swirled across the bare and frozen landscapes of Europe during the coldest periods of the latest ice age. These paleo-tempests, which are seldom matched in our modern climate frequently covered Western Europe in some of the thickest layers of ice-age dust found anywhere previously on Earth. This is demonstrated by a series of new estimates of the sedimentation and accumulation rates of European loess layers obtained by Senior Research Scientist Denis-Didier Rousseau from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and colleagues. The work, which is published in
Climate Change Weekly #386
Before the federal government undertakes any law, policy, or regulation, it should ask a few critical questions, the answers to which should determine whether it acts at all and, if so, what course of action to take. The first set of questions are, is there a serious problem to be addressed, is it a problem that can by be remedied by domestic action, and if so, is the federal government constitutionally delegated and legally empowered to address it? Only if the answers to these three questions are Yes, Yes, and Yes should the government then proceed to ask what level of government is best situated to address the problem.
Environmental News Network - Scientists Discover How the Potentially Oldest Coral Reefs in the Mediterranean Developed enn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from enn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.