Climate Change

Slightly off topic... Antarctica Map from the 1500's. Not an ice sheet in sight. Perfect cartography of the underlying continent shape and mountains as it exists today, without any technology 500 years ago at the time the map of the continent was made.....only way to do that would have been from above looking down........hmmm ....Riddle me this batman :)

Piri Reis Map



Sure, but first riddle me this. How come the oldest ice cores taken from Antarctica are 2.7 million years old and geologists estimate Antarctic began its frozen climate 34 million years ago? Ice cores relevant to the estimated time of the Piri Reis Map show ice. How can that be??

A 180 m deep ice core from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, was drilled by a team led by Nancy Bertler in 2001/2002[10]. The top 50 m of the ice core was analysed at 2.5 cm resolution using a continuous melting system. Ice core samples were analysed for stable isotope ratios, major ions and trace elements. An age model was extrapolated to the ice core using a firm decompaction model[10]. Deuterium data (δD) were used to reconstruct changes in summer temperature in the McMurdo Dry Valleys over the last 900 years. The study showed that there were three distinct periods: the Medieval Warm Period (1140 to 1287 AD), the Little Ice Age (1288 to 1807 AD) and the Modern Era (1808 to 2000 AD).

There is considerable debate if the Piri Reis Map is not Antarctica, but really South America. Then again some folks like to believe in Intelligent Design in lieu of Evolution, or the Biblical Creation instead of the Big Bang. Even the current Pope downplayed play the allegorical Biblical versions of these occurrences with his comment that "God is not a magician"...
 
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WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT if the earth will survive...it will....we are talking about the effect on humans...a 2 degree change caused the lil ice age....with the amount of people living now a disruption in the climate would cause many deaths I would think

I always laugh at those who point to extreme cold weather and say "global warming" ??? not knowing that extremes both ways are caused by global warmimg
 
The map is legit . And it’s Antarctica from the 16th century.

No one is claiming that the map itself is "an elaborate fake". The question is simply regarding the historical and geographical accuracy of the antarctic coastline it depicts, given that in 1513 such knowledge was not available from any traditional source: Is it indeed a correct depiction derived from some unknown ancient source, or the product of "artistic license", often taken by cartographers of the period regarding "Terra Incognita".

Based on contemporary scholarship, claiming that the map is undeniably an accurate representation of an ice-free antarctic coastline during any period when it would have been possible for humans to determine such is quite far-fetched.

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Antarctica first had glaciers at the end of the Devonian period, around 350 million years ago. But it was still joined to the Gondwana supercontinent at that time and in any case the climate wasn’t cold enough for it to freeze completely. There are fossils of plants from this era.

The polar ice caps melted for a while after that and it wasn’t until Africa and Antarctica separated around 160 million years ago that it began to cool again. By 23 million years ago, Antarctica was mostly icy forest and for the last 15 million years, it has been a frozen desert under a thick ice sheet.
 
LOL....

Glacier National Park is replacing signs that predicted its glaciers would be gone by 2020

The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN.

In 2017, the park was told by the agency that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model, Kurzmen said. But tight maintenance budgets made it impossible for the park to immediately change the signs.
 
global warming ....... woke up in the middle of the night a couple days ago. Usual 3:00 am pit stop. Had trouble falling back asleep. I have no idea why, but global warming was in my head. I started thinking about how one big volcanic eruption would drop global temperature dramatically. Then I was thinking how a random small asteroid would have the same effect.
I feel that us humans are part of the evolution of the planet. If the climate changes because of our presence here ..... it's just part of that process. Contrary to what millenials and little Greta believe It's not going to be fixed by switching to electric cars and eating fake hamburgers to reduce cow farts.
 
was watching Smithsonian last night, two of the most climate changing episodes were the asteroid ☄ crash 63 million years ago, and the other was the Siberian Volacanoes which laid down Lava 1000 feet thick how many miles wide...

the narrator at the end explained how we are contributing to our CC, sounds sympathetic... cellie...

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global warming ....... woke up in the middle of the night a couple days ago. Usual 3:00 am pit stop. Had trouble falling back asleep. I have no idea why, but global warming was in my head. I started thinking about how one big volcanic eruption would drop global temperature dramatically. Then I was thinking how a random small asteroid would have the same effect.
and then right on que:
 
Rut-roh, LI and VA/MD Eastern Shore facing some future issues...

Coastal harm from invading saltwater ‘happening right now’​

pressherald.com/2020/11/23/coastal-harm-from-invading-saltwater-happening-right-now/

By BILL LAMBRECHT and GRACIE TODDThe Howard Center for Investigative JournalismNovember 23, 2020

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Four Native American tribes on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast requested United Nations assistance this year to force action by the U.S. government on invading salt. Their formal complaint cited “climate-forced displacement’’ and said saltwater had poisoned their land, their crops and their medicinal plants.

“That strips us of not only being able to generate an income to provide for ourselves, it also strips us of our ability to feed ourselves healthy,” Shirell Parfait-Dardar, chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, said in an interview.

The tribes’ plight offers an extreme example of a lesser-known but fast-growing impact in the climate crisis: saltwater intrusion.

The landward movement of seawater threatens drinking water supplies, coastal farming and coastal ecosystems. Rising seas, more frequent storms, higher tides, drought and the pressure of pumping for drinking water are combining to accelerate the salt invasion.

New scientific research along the East Coast and in California shows measurable and sometimes startling change, much of it from saltwater’s unseen advance beneath the surface. The threat is widespread; roughly 40 percent of Americans live in coastal counties, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It’s not something that we need to wait until 2050 or 2100 for. It’s not something happening only to polar bears. It’s happening right now,” said Marcelo Ardon, an associate professor of ecology and biogeochemistry at North Carolina State University who is documenting changes in North Carolina’s coastline.

The cascading consequences of saltwater intrusion were starkly revealed in interviews with more than 100 researchers, planners and coastal residents, along with soil testing, drone footage and analyses of well-sample data conducted by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
Saltwater_Intrusion_51127
This photo provided by the University of Maryland shows Brooke Czwartacki taking a measurement in a well in Awendaw, South Carolina. Czwartacki regularly checks the salinity of well water as saltwater invades the state’s aquifers. Hunter Musi/Stanford University via Associated Press

Among the Howard Center’s findings:

Thousands of acres of farmland have gone out of production as salt imparts its ruinous properties to croplands. A single county in southern Maryland has lost more than 2 square miles of farm-rich uplands while in California, planners in the fertile Central Valley are fighting to stem losses from historic salt deposits that already total 250,000 acres.

Drinking water supplies in public aquifers and private wells from Long Island, New York, to the Florida Keys are increasingly threatened as some underground sources reach salinity levels nearly equal to seawater. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, homeowners and businesses can expect their water and sewer bills to rise 5 percent every year through at least the next decade, said Water and Sewer Director Kevin Lynskey.

In South Florida, nearly one-third of 215 monitoring wells showed a five-year trend of increasing salinity with just 16 showing a downward salinity trend, according to a Howard Center analysis of U.S. Geological Survey test results. The problem is compounded by a massive saltwater plume radiating from the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station toward wellfields in the Biscayne aquifer that supply drinking water in the Miami area.

Coastal wetlands, a buffer against more frequent storms and a sink to capture carbon, are fast disappearing. In Maryland, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge already has seen 5,000 acres of wetland disappear. In Louisiana — which loses nearly 30 square miles of coastal marsh yearly — a study concludes that remaining wetlands could be gone within 50 years.

“Ghost forests” of dead and dying trees are spreading along coastlines from New Jersey to the Gulf of Mexico as saltwater pummels from above and seeps in from beneath.

Along the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia, once-verdant forests are being transformed into foreboding vistas of bleached-white tree skeletons engulfed by invasive plants.
Saltwater_Intrusion_50309
This photo provided by the University of Maryland shows invading saltwater and its effect on trees from the roots up. The last to succumb at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore are the loblolly pines. Sarah Sopher/University of Maryland via Associated Press

In North Carolina along the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, roughly 15 percent of a 65-square-mile area has changed recently from healthy forest into ghost forest, according to newly published research by Lindsey Smart, a research associate at North Carolina State’s Center for Geospatial Analytics.

And on the Gulf Coast along the Suwannee River, which runs from Georgia to the Florida Panhandle, “The pines, oaks, cedars and palms have this orderly trajectory of death based on who can hack it in a saline environment and who can’t,’’ said David Kaplan, who heads the H.T. Odum Center for Wetlands at the University of Florida. “One of the last remnants are the palms … the last to go.”

In one recent success, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in southern Maryland — a focus of researchers from around the world because of its rapid change — acquired over 3,000 acres for marsh migration.

The transaction pointed to the stakes as coastal lands rich in history disappear: Ten acres of a newly purchased parcel were the homestead of Ben Ross, father of Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist and underground railroad conductor who led the pre-Civil War escape of dozens of slaves.

THE INVISIBLE FLOOD
“It’s an enormous change, immense,” Emily Bernhardt, a Duke University ecosystem ecologist, said of saltwater’s impacts. “Even as an expert on the topic, I have been shocked to discover the extent of coastal forests lost to sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion over the last several decades.”

Yet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations scientific body established to study the warming climate and prepare for change, observed in a report last year that information is lacking.
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In this photo provided by the University of Maryland, University of Maryland Professor Kate Tully, left, talks with University of Delaware Professor Holly Michael about using the St. Jones Reserve south of Dover, Delaware, as a research site for a $4.3 million National Science Foundation grant to study the transforming effects of invading saltwater on the Delmarva Peninsula.

In September, the National Science Foundation awarded University of Maryland agroecologist Kate Tully and her partners a $4.3 million grant to study saltwater intrusion — a measure of scientific concern about the problem.

In a TEDx talk she delivered in September, Tully said that “many people are unaware, but there is an invisible flood moving far inland in advance of the surface floods that can drown our homes.”

She added in an interview: “We can’t in the short term stop the seas from rising, but we can manage this transition intelligently and do it in a coordinated way. But we have to have buy-in from farmers, from the communities and from local governments. And the solutions need to be science-based.”

Said Duke’s Bernhardt: “These salty fields and dying forests are happening throughout rural coastal areas, which are often economically disadvantaged. I worry about whether farmers and landowners in these communities will have the resources needed to adapt to the changes already occurring.”

‘LIKE THE EARLY STAGES OF CANCER’
Saltwater intrusion also is a threat to lands inland.

“It’s the sleeping giant of most semiarid regions on the planet,” Wesley Danskin, a research hydrologist at the USGS in California, said of troubles stemming from salt.

Salt is a significant threat in the farm-rich Central Valley of California. Local agencies are implementing plans to balance overdrafted aquifers — critical water supplies that are prone to saltwater intrusion.

“If those aquifers are not recharged and restored, eventually you won’t have any agriculture,” said Marc Del Piero, an expert in water law who once sat on the state’s Water Resources Control Board.

Proponents say recharging aquifers by putting freshwater back into them will preserve agriculture in California. But the path to sustainability is laden with sacrifice.

Over the next 20 years, farmers in California may have to fallow anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million acres of farmland due to a decreased water supply, according to estimates by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“It’s like the early stages of cancer,” said Daniel Cozad, executive director of the Central Valley Salinity Coalition, an alliance of public agencies, nonprofits and private interests. “You don’t feel it, you don’t see it and everything seems to be pretty normal. But if you’re not keeping track of it, it can get much worse.”

WETLANDS AS CARBON SINKS
Coastal wetlands and mangroves increasingly inundated by saltwater are some of the world’s most effective carbon-storage ecosystems. They capture carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas from human activities — and permanently store it, preventing it from entering the atmosphere.

Many nations are looking ahead to the time of a functioning global carbon market that enables countries and corporations to meet emission-reduction goals by buying credits that, in effect, invest in carbon-cutting projects elsewhere.

President-elect Joe Biden is being pressed to move toward establishing a price on carbon, a politically divisive step. His transition team already has received a set of proposals that includes establishing a “carbon bank” in the Department of Agriculture for paying farmers and landowners to store carbon.

“It’s a system that has the potential to be managed,” said Ken Krauss, a USGS research ecologist who is working with foreign partners. “Over time, if we can figure out how to do it, you can manage these forests to make them more or less tidal to potentially sequester more carbon and store it long term.”

From NOAA satellite data, Elliott White Jr. in Virginia’s Plant Ecology and Remote Sensing Lab calculated that coastal regions from Maine to Texas had experienced a net loss of 5,387 square miles of coastal and river swamps in a 20-year period from 1996 to 2016.

White said that with saltwater advancing through rivers and groundwater, forests inland will experience similar loss in diversity and loss in size.

“Swamps, despite people always wanting to drain them, are important for cultural reasons,’’ he said. Throughout history, swampy coasts have offered refuge for people in need of it, among them enslaved people and Native American tribes. Cajun culture sprouted where the Acadians settled in the swamps of southern Louisiana.

“People should care because if we lose these wetlands, we’re losing a multitude of things,” White said.
Along the Louisiana coast — where a football field of land is being lost every 100 minutes — the tribes threatened with relocation have yet to hear an answer from the United Nations.

On the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw land, Chief Parfait-Dardar said saltwater has killed trees, which leads to more erosion, while destroying community gardens.

Saltwater intrusion, she said, “affects everything. … It’s all working in one big circle and it’s quite heartbreaking to watch.”

Online: Saltwater Invasion

The Howard Center in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland is funded by $3 million from the Scripps Howard Foundation. It honors Roy W. Howard, one of the newspaper world’s pioneers.
 
It's crossed my mind driving around the Shore on either Atlantic side or the Bay side. Heavy tides & storms frequently push the seawater inland. And a lot of areas along the shore are low lying & saltwater doesn't just seep over the land - figured it had to be seeping under the land as well even when not being driven over it.

Those "ghost forests" seem to be everywhere. Always thought it was probably due to flooding.
 
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