Jacquelyn Gill: Understanding the past is often the key to understanding the future.
Jacquelyn Gill is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s been researching a period of rapid cooling that occurred about 13,000 years ago. Gill said that global temperatures took an extreme and sudden dip, just as the world was coming out of an ice age. She spoke with EarthSky at a science meeting in late 2009.
Jacquelyn Gill: It’s important because it’s one of our best-dated and most studied examples of rapid climate change.
Gill has been studying animals that lived around that time, using fungal spores preserved in sediment as an indicator of wildlife presence. She’s found that extinctions of big ice age animals – creatures like mastodons – happened about 1,000 years before this brief cooling period.
Jacquelyn Gill: Immediately following the decline in these animal populations, the first wildfires pop up on the landscape. We also see widespread vegetation change. It really seems like the landscape is noticing the loss of these herbivores.
She said that scientists still aren’t sure why animals of the ice age died off, or why the world’s climate might suddenly warm and cool. But, she added, mining the past for clues about rapid climate change could help us better understand how the environment stands to be affected by today’s global warming. Gill said that this short period of rapid cooling that happened after the last ice age is called the Younger Dryas.
Jacquelyn Gill: It’s important because it’s one of our best dated and most studied examples of rapid climate change. We can see this cold period that lasts several centuries but it really only takes a few years for this return to glacial conditions. We are not talking about 0.1 degrees Celsius in 100 years; we’re talking about a really rapid event here. It’s really interesting to understand the Earth’s climate system from that perspective if, for example, we are interested in rapid climate change events in the future.
Gill told EarthSky that this is also the period when the first evidence of human life appears in North America. She explained that there is growing evidence suggesting that during this period humans were setting fires, using the land, and hunting animals, all pressures that could have significantly affected animal populations and extinctions.
Jacquelyn Gill: Because we don’t have time machines, paleoecologists and paleoclimatologists have had to become ecological detectives to try to determine what happened. We do know that temperatures got colder but we don’t necessarily know what caused this global climate change.
Jacquelyn Gill: We like to think of the end of the last ice age as this really fascinating natural experiment. It’s the last time that we really saw the earth undergo rapid climatic warming and vegetation and plants had to respond to that climate change. Understanding the processes surrounding these events, extinctions, the relationships between humans and their natural world, climate change during this period, help us understand the extinction and global warming events that we are currently experiencing.
Keep that research money coming in you witch burners. STOP SCARING MY KIDS with this enviro CO2WMD doomsday fear mongering.
Society puts scientists and science and politicians and politics in the same dishonest boat.
Nice job!
To the commentor:
Stop scaring your kids?
Witchburners?
Doomsday?
Have faith my son, when you turn the key in the ignition your car shall start. Have Faith in science, you do. Without faith, you wouldn’t remember why you need your key in the first place.
You entire life is based on faith in smart people. Your response clearly indicates you can’t contribute to science since your mind seems to be swirling down some scary self-created tunnel of fear.
I doubt you have children, can’t believe any women would mate with someone who explodes with insanity on backwoods science stories.
Don’t worry, you won’t fall over the edge of the Earth.
Now about the story, has anyone dated the impact crater in Adams County Ohio? The natives built the longest serpent mound in N.America on the edge of the crater, right where 3 glacial epochs terminate. This could have been created by part of a larger impact that occured just to the north on the glacier and therefor couldn’t leave a crater.
Dear Al and Earl_E,
Thanks so much for visiting our site and taking the time to comment!
This is the story of what has happened to the Earth as best scientist Jacquelyn Gill knows it. She’s done extensive research, found the physical evidence, published papers on it. That doesn’t make her case rock-solid, but the scientific publication process is pretty rigorous, so, while her work may evolve, it’s not likely her conclusions will change drastically.
As for climate change, overwhelming scientific evidence suggests it’s real, and it’s happening today – despite this cold winter!! :)
The effects are uncertain, the degree of warming is uncertain, but as scientist Daniel Sigman said to me: it’s good to have some ‘insurance’ for the worst possible outcome, rather than just close our eyes and hope for the best one.
Keep looking up,
Beth
Do take some time to comment on the same at the website
cheers
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-hottest-hoax-in-the-world
I think it goes without saying that something struck the continent of North America 13,000 years ago. It seems like it was a meteorite or asteroid, and some are saying that it broke off from Mars and brought us some microscopic Martian insects in the process. While I am not certain about the last part, we know that the waters of the Atlantic rose and crested 13,000 years ago and we know that the wooly mammoth and the sabretooth tiger became extinct approximately 13,000 years ago. 13,000 years ago marks the “Great Flood” talked about in the Bible and in Sumerian texts and in countless other Native American histories such as the Aztecs and the Hopi. We need to understand that this did happen because now, 13,000 years later, we are once again aligning with the center of the galaxy and wild weather is once again upon us. Atlantis also sunk 13,000 years ago. It is under the South China Sea. Thanks for your research.