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Post by marchesarosa on Nov 18, 2012 11:17:08 GMT 1
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 18, 2012 17:04:14 GMT 1
That's interesting, but seriously uninformed. Five million years ago? The climatic conditions of the mediterranean - the entire planet - has changed far more dramatically than a minor alteration in the course of the Nile or the extent of an inland sea, and on a far more recent timescale. We know that the whole of Egypt was grassland as recently as 15,000 years ago, for example. The earliest recorded description of the Pyramids, an eyesight account by Herodutus in the 5th Century BC, places them on islands in a vast lake network - an account verified by recent underground radar analysis of the Giza Plain. In the Roman period North Africa - the stretch of land from Morocco to Egypt, at least 100 miles inland - was the bread basket of the world: it's where they grew the vast proportion of their wheat.
We also know that less than 15,000 years ago there were vast ice sheets covering much of India and Africa, at the same time as Siberia was temperate - as proven by the carbon-dated wooly mammoth found near Spitzbergen in 1901, suddenly frozen, along with thousands of other temperate-zone mammals, while still chewing the buttercups in its mouth.
These sudden alterations in regional climatic conditions are on a much short time-scale than the precessional cycle (26,000 years). They're caused by sudden catastrophic shifts in the Earth's crust. 60 million years ago the North Pole was as far south as 55 degrees latitude; 300 million years ago it was in the Pacific, off the coast of Mexico. As recently as 15,000 years ago the North Pole was in Hudson's Bay, the British Isles were more than two thousand miles further south than they are now, and Antarctica was entirely free of ice, as temperate plants found thousands of feet deep beneath the ice has proven: as a continent, it must have been many thousands of miles to the north than its present location at the southern pole. In other words, the polar and equatorial regions periodically shift, by thousands of miles, drastically and very suddenly changing the climatic conditions of entire continents (and causing when they do so cataclysmic worldwide floods and mass extinction events.) The Earth's crust is like the skin of an orange, and it's subject to free rotation, as an entire unit. The harbinger of such global slippages are fast fluctuations in the strength of the geomagnetic field, and rapid migrations of the magnetic poles - just as is happening at the moment.
If you really want something to worry about.
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Post by marchesarosa on Nov 18, 2012 17:19:49 GMT 1
Aaagh!
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Post by mrsonde on Nov 18, 2012 20:16:55 GMT 1
;D It puts the AGW nonsense into perspective, doesn't it?
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