Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Pleistocene Nonconformity - 6 - the changes

What makes the logic of this shift so compelling to myself is the elimination of a lot of theoretical impossibilities that the scientific community was forced to accept simply because they were there. We replaced Noah's ark as an explanation for an Ice age location or two that was simply impossible by climatic ideas of the past and I am rather certain, doubly impossible with today's climatic knowledge.


Resultant Crustal Changes

1 Hudson Bay, formerly the pole is shifted south by thirty degrees, taking the bulk of the massive north American Polar Ice sheet into temperate climes. This is extraordinarily important because it ultimately releases this ice into the ocean lifting sea levels over 150 feet. The Laurentian sheet finished melting out about 9,000 years ago, 3,000 years after the Scandinavian Sheet and the European Mountain glaciers which also contributed 150 feet in sea level gain.

2 Greenland migrates from one side of the polar region to its current locale staying within the Arctic Circle and permitting the survival to date of its ice cap. Precipitation levels change. This conforms to the anomalous precipitation levels currently experienced in both Greenland and Antarctica. Less precipitation is now associated with the thickest ice sheets and vice versa for both regions.

3 The Caribbean shifts from the Temperate Zone to the tropics commencing the full heat pump of the Gulf Stream. This leads directly to the warming of Europe and the swift removal of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet and the first major lift of the sea level. Between the two ice sheets enough fresh water was supplied for the sea level to rise 300 feet. Prior to the application of this heat pump the two sheets likely covered the entirety of the Arctic Sea and partially inland at all the margins. The only release was ice calving in the North Atlantic at the edge of the Arctic shelf and through the Davis Strait. There is no reason to assume that much of it was even floating since huge thicknesses existed. The Northern Hemisphere was much like Antarctica today with massive seaborne ice sheets struggling to reach open water.

4 Eastern Siberia migrates from cold Temperate Zone conditions to the sub Arctic. Conditions do not markedly change as we move from a world of extensive glaciation as existed in Europe to one further north and just as unpleasant. The major change comes over time as the grounded Arctic Ocean ice sheet dissipates and fresh water accumulations from the northern Siberian plains escape into the sea. Little is thoroughly understood, but it is likely that much Siberian Drainage had no escape route except to ultimately build ice on the Arctic Sheet. This may also hold for the Mackenzie River in Northern Canada.

5 Africa merely rotates around the center of rotation in the Congo. With the exception of a wave of earthquakes and tsunamis, life goes on virtually unscathed with minor climate changes. Africa retained massive genetic diversity, while the rest of the global population was almost wiped out, probably reduced to remnant hunter-gatherers in the hills with the necessary survival skills. Genetic diversity collapsed. It is also argued that since Africa is the homeland of all primate development, this diversity is it’s expected due. This might be true except there is no wall and movement and forced intermarriage is the norm for these populations. Because of the huge time frames involved, I am more inclined to expect close similarity in terms of genetic complexity in the Old World. Certainly any successful base population could cover the geography of the Old World in an historical eye blink.

In fact many of the putative successor populations in the Old World outside of Africa appear to be strongly linked to the mountainous regions of Central Asia. These were never areas famous for naturally promoting high population densities. Their genetic influence can only be possible if the much denser natural populations of the lowlands had disappeared.

6 Europe is tilted slightly northward, but the advent of a hugely strengthened Gulf Stream is now the major factor in climate change. The Mediterranean begins to warm up as the northern glaciers swiftly disappear inducing the first major lift in sea levels. The Scandinavian ice sheet and the extensive mountain glaciations are eliminated as well as near sub arctic to Arctic conditions.

7 The Amazon shifts from been largely north of the equator to been largely south of the equator. It remains in the tropics and experiences little change save coastal devastation.

8 India and Southeast Asia including southern China and most of Indonesia shift from the south tropical zone to the north tropical zone. Climatic conditions remain largely the same although a major redistribution of rainfall probably takes place. Inundation from the sea is at its worst here, simply because of the area’s total vulnerability to the likely maximum stroke of the tsunamis. There is no shelter from any direction except into the Himalayas. This area was on the arc of rotation.

9 Australia was deep into the temperate to sub arctic. It moved north into the warm temperate to sub tropical. Glacial cover as existed was removed, particularly in Tasmania.

10 The bulk of Antarctica stayed within the Antarctic Circle preserving the main ice cap. The remainder (Lesser Antarctica) which was sub arctic to almost temperate moved into the Antarctic Circle and started rapidly accumulating additional ice. A warm ocean current similar to the Gulf Stream may have originally bathed this area, leaving a lot of room for climate variation and habitability. Otherwise, it would certainly have been highly glaciated and cold prior to the crustal shift.

Let us take this a little further. We have already intimated that polar ice caps are just that. Global rotation forces atmospheric circulation in such a way as to create a profoundly stable accumulation environment at the poles. Antarctica is an excellent example. What went wrong in the Arctic? Millions of years of ice accumulation disappeared in a geological second. A huge part of the answer, at least for Europe, was the emergence of the Gulf Stream, which delivered the heat necessary to not only eliminate the Scandinavian icesheet, but also prevented the Arctic Ocean and the islands west of Greenland from been covered with ice as they should be.

Even if we do not accept the premise of a global shift of the crust we still have to explain where the heat build-up in the Atlantic tropics went for the preceding millions of years. This leaves only the South Atlantic and the Antarctic Archipelago, which is rotationally in the right direction. Pre shift we would still have a weak Gulf Stream that delivered plenty of moisture but far less heat, and a strong southern current that pumped heat and moisture into a temperate Lesser Antarctica.

11 The Pacific rotated like Africa on an axis near its center. Ferocious Tsunamis on its edges would have been restrained by the massive mountain ranges girding it with the exception of the area of Southeast Asia.

The most compelling argument for the validity of this event is the simple fact that it eliminates an even more troublesome theory. That the output of the sun declined so substantially as to expand subarctic and arctic conditions deep into the Temperate Zone. We do not have permanent ice on Baffin Island or Bathurst inlet or in Siberia today, yet the climate there is at the limit of our capability for sustaining a presence. And the Sun’s annually available energy there, is a fraction of what is received in Buffalo. For an ice sheet to develop and be sustained in the latitudes of Buffalo, the sun’s energy output would have to drop to much less than currently received today in the high arctic.

Other consequences of such low solar output would be the elimination of larger life forms in the sub Arctic at least. This includes Siberia. The tropics would see snow and killer frosts similar to current temperate conditions along with massive mountain glaciation, sharply reducing plant diversity. All the available evidence supports none of this. At the most an Antarctic style ice sheet chilled the Northern Temperate zone and generated a somewhat cooler sub tropical zone. This may have been more local than general.

The likely truth supported by our knowledge of stellar physics is that the sun’s energy output has only fluctuated mildly during the last three billion years. And this ultimately means that polar icecaps had to be at the pole, not the latitude of Buffalo. Polar icecaps form at the pole and spread out from there for a lot of good reasons to do with atmospheric convection and maximum heat loss. They do not form elsewhere.

The one major consequence of this type of event is that the North Polar Region is now largely oceanic. It may be that when the next cyclical cold spell arrives in about 18,000 years, this region will not be able to buildup the ice sheet normally associated with an ice age and the Northern Hemisphere will be largely spared. It will still be chilly.

Although this is off topic, a rather interesting geological consequence of the mile thick polar Laurentian ice sheet was that the land itself was depressed by perhaps up to a thousand meters. This depressant effect extended into the Western Canadian Sedimentary basin.

Now when organic material sinks below two thousand meters, heat, water and pressure combine to convert this material into oil. When this oil is formed it then migrates upward to the surface unless trapped by sealed strata. In practice most of this oil escapes back into the surface environment leaving a scant remnant behind, which is the source of all our oil industry. During the million-year life of the polar ice sheet the eastern edge of the sedimentary basin was pushed down, sending a huge thickness of organic bearing strata into the oil production zone. As a result the produced oil came to the surface and was initially preserved by the extreme conditions associated with the high latitudes. These today form the Canadian Tar Sands, which today represents a possible twenty percent of the global oil reserve.

On an optimistic note, related subsurface heavy oil deposits in combination with the Tar Sands could approach one trillion barrels of producible reserves. This is as much as has been used globally over the past one hundred years. And the necessary production technique breakthroughs are happening now.

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