The Vostok Ice Core (last friday's post) opens the door to additional hypothesis that we will now entertain. I have already dealt extensively on this blog with the idea that the Holocene was initiated by a thirty degree shift in the Earth’s crust along a line from the North Pole to the Center of Hudson’s Bay. We go further and surmise that the evidence also supports a directed asteroid impact as the trigger. The evidence for both is extensive and strongly conforming. I still do not expect you to accept these ideas as with the exception of Einstein and a few others over the past sixty years, I am perhaps the only real champion.
You will discover that if you start mapping the known extent of ice flows, that all the conflicts disappear that bedeviled the original acceptance of ice ages in the first place. We no longer need to pretend that ice flows will survive at sea level in temperate environments when we cannot make it happen in the far north today. It is amazing how serious reservations are often forgotten in science because their champions die out. I personally have found that a fruitful source of new ideas.
Since we can comfortably separate out the Holocene as a special case, we can now look at the balance of the data as a very different regime. The Antarctic remained a polar continent surrounded by a continuous circumpolar current and wind system that separated its climate niche largely from the rest of the Earth. This too can be comfortably isolated from our considerations. At best, a small part of it had a climate like Norway’s as Atlantic warm waters partially penetrated the current providing excellent fishing grounds.
The Northern Hemisphere was a very different tale. The polar cap was intact for a million years as a direct result of the emergence of the Panama Isthmus that blocked the interchange of waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific and thus dumping heat into the Arctic. I would go even further. Prior to this closure the heat flow was possibly large enough to keep the North ice free and possibly strong enough to reduce the Southern Ice Cap. Applying our climate modeling programs would be very interesting and the geological changes are well enough known to get a pretty good first estimate that can then be confirmed by direct investigation of sediments.
During the ice Age, the Atlantic heat flows were insufficient to much affect either cap even when the climate warmed up as happened several times as shown by the Vostok record. The ice retreated, but briefly. Sea levels rose, but only a few feet. Present day Greenland is a good example.
Even had the climate warmed and sustained itself as has in fact happened during the Holocene, the retreat would still have had minor impact as is the case today in Antarctica. What conceivable difference would a ten degree drop in global temperatures make to Antarctica? The same was true for the Northern Ice Cap.
This all means that with two polar ice caps, that the global temperature is ten degrees colder. From this we know that the presence of two polar ice caps will lower the sea level by three hundred feet. Also outside the vastly expanded coastal plains, we will have a far less stable climate regime that will rumble back and forth with as it impacts with shifting glaciation and ocean changes brought on by the rise and fall of sea ice supply.
The chart shows that there was never a stability zone even at the lower ranges. It likely hit its lows because ice flooded the oceans for a few years until it melted away and the ocean had a chance to recover.
Today, the only threat is the Antarctic and the currents and winds are set up to contain the events. Imagine the Ross Ice Shelf breaking up and flooding into the Atlantic over a few years. Such ice shelves existed and certainly flooded into the Atlantic during the ice age. Thus we have a convincing causation for the long climate shifts shown by the Vostok chart. Huge amounts of cold ice could get shifted all the way into equatorial regions chilling the surface waters and needing years to recover.
In fact looking at the chart it is easy to believe that I am looking at the trace of ice removal and this includes everything except as explanation for the sudden rapid warming that took place at least four times before the Holocene. In fact, I find it easy to create a narrative of explainable differences between the four apparent cycles. I will not bore you with it, but another question is immediately apparent. I need someone to figure out how to measure the area under the chart from low to low. If the result is very similar, it would be an excellent indicator that the periodicity of the peak event is excellent and may in fact be cosmological.
I recall grinding the raw ice core data from Greenland back in 1996 to confirm a Greenland climate shift 12900 years ago. We need to do something like that here. Actually summing the temperatures between the two points should be sufficient.
So what about the brief hot spots? There we have two possible explanations, one that I have already discussed at length. We may be on an orbit that brings us close to Sirius and its star group. The weakness with such an idea is that is demands a very precise periodicity in the orbit. The apparent periodicity is very close to been good enough to give credence to the idea which is why it has champions.
An investigation of comparable ice cores could refine the periodicity to a convincing level of precision. At least we know it should be done.
Then there is the excellent possibility that the sun simply gets hotter. There the periodicity is much rougher and we are likely still overdue. Such periodicity has been observed in the short term but not on the time scales we are looking for. Or it could also have been that the crust was deliberately shifted when the sun became warmer. Except that I simply do not think that the sun is warmer at all.
The bottom line is that we have a very consistent ice age climate chart with a periodic hot spot that is external to the ice age narrative and that is quickly subdued by the ice age. One way or the other, the hot spot is cosmological and it will not kill us, but may inconvenience us. The solar causation allows us to accept the dating regime as is and to wonder how soon. The orbital causation puts us thousands of years away but going in the right direction inward while strongly indicating that the time axis needs to be stretched for far time and shrunken for near time.
You will discover that if you start mapping the known extent of ice flows, that all the conflicts disappear that bedeviled the original acceptance of ice ages in the first place. We no longer need to pretend that ice flows will survive at sea level in temperate environments when we cannot make it happen in the far north today. It is amazing how serious reservations are often forgotten in science because their champions die out. I personally have found that a fruitful source of new ideas.
Since we can comfortably separate out the Holocene as a special case, we can now look at the balance of the data as a very different regime. The Antarctic remained a polar continent surrounded by a continuous circumpolar current and wind system that separated its climate niche largely from the rest of the Earth. This too can be comfortably isolated from our considerations. At best, a small part of it had a climate like Norway’s as Atlantic warm waters partially penetrated the current providing excellent fishing grounds.
The Northern Hemisphere was a very different tale. The polar cap was intact for a million years as a direct result of the emergence of the Panama Isthmus that blocked the interchange of waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific and thus dumping heat into the Arctic. I would go even further. Prior to this closure the heat flow was possibly large enough to keep the North ice free and possibly strong enough to reduce the Southern Ice Cap. Applying our climate modeling programs would be very interesting and the geological changes are well enough known to get a pretty good first estimate that can then be confirmed by direct investigation of sediments.
During the ice Age, the Atlantic heat flows were insufficient to much affect either cap even when the climate warmed up as happened several times as shown by the Vostok record. The ice retreated, but briefly. Sea levels rose, but only a few feet. Present day Greenland is a good example.
Even had the climate warmed and sustained itself as has in fact happened during the Holocene, the retreat would still have had minor impact as is the case today in Antarctica. What conceivable difference would a ten degree drop in global temperatures make to Antarctica? The same was true for the Northern Ice Cap.
This all means that with two polar ice caps, that the global temperature is ten degrees colder. From this we know that the presence of two polar ice caps will lower the sea level by three hundred feet. Also outside the vastly expanded coastal plains, we will have a far less stable climate regime that will rumble back and forth with as it impacts with shifting glaciation and ocean changes brought on by the rise and fall of sea ice supply.
The chart shows that there was never a stability zone even at the lower ranges. It likely hit its lows because ice flooded the oceans for a few years until it melted away and the ocean had a chance to recover.
Today, the only threat is the Antarctic and the currents and winds are set up to contain the events. Imagine the Ross Ice Shelf breaking up and flooding into the Atlantic over a few years. Such ice shelves existed and certainly flooded into the Atlantic during the ice age. Thus we have a convincing causation for the long climate shifts shown by the Vostok chart. Huge amounts of cold ice could get shifted all the way into equatorial regions chilling the surface waters and needing years to recover.
In fact looking at the chart it is easy to believe that I am looking at the trace of ice removal and this includes everything except as explanation for the sudden rapid warming that took place at least four times before the Holocene. In fact, I find it easy to create a narrative of explainable differences between the four apparent cycles. I will not bore you with it, but another question is immediately apparent. I need someone to figure out how to measure the area under the chart from low to low. If the result is very similar, it would be an excellent indicator that the periodicity of the peak event is excellent and may in fact be cosmological.
I recall grinding the raw ice core data from Greenland back in 1996 to confirm a Greenland climate shift 12900 years ago. We need to do something like that here. Actually summing the temperatures between the two points should be sufficient.
So what about the brief hot spots? There we have two possible explanations, one that I have already discussed at length. We may be on an orbit that brings us close to Sirius and its star group. The weakness with such an idea is that is demands a very precise periodicity in the orbit. The apparent periodicity is very close to been good enough to give credence to the idea which is why it has champions.
An investigation of comparable ice cores could refine the periodicity to a convincing level of precision. At least we know it should be done.
Then there is the excellent possibility that the sun simply gets hotter. There the periodicity is much rougher and we are likely still overdue. Such periodicity has been observed in the short term but not on the time scales we are looking for. Or it could also have been that the crust was deliberately shifted when the sun became warmer. Except that I simply do not think that the sun is warmer at all.
The bottom line is that we have a very consistent ice age climate chart with a periodic hot spot that is external to the ice age narrative and that is quickly subdued by the ice age. One way or the other, the hot spot is cosmological and it will not kill us, but may inconvenience us. The solar causation allows us to accept the dating regime as is and to wonder how soon. The orbital causation puts us thousands of years away but going in the right direction inward while strongly indicating that the time axis needs to be stretched for far time and shrunken for near time.
