Study: Greenland prior eras as warm or warmer than today

18 12 2007

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I was forwarded a slide show presentation done by Thomas Lowell et al of the University of Cincinnati titled: Organic Remains from the Istorvet Ice Cap, Liverpool Land, East Greenland: A Record of Late Holocene Climate Change

It was presented last week at AGU’s Greenland Climate Change Past and Present session. It has some very interesting data in it. In summary it has a report on occurrence of subfossil organic remains, with organics recovered in locations presently void of plant growth.


Picture of Istorvet organic remnants at edge of glacier melt.

The preliminary conclusion from the data collected in the field work is that presently the small ice caps at high latitudes in Greenland are retracting to locations where they were at 1000 years ago.  The presence of subfossil vegetation was found within 280 vertical meters of ice cap summit and where comparable modern assemblages do not exist. The implication seems to be that there were warmer periods in these areas prior to today, warm enough for plant growth.

According to the study, the organic material in Liverpool Land radiocarbon dates from 400 to 1015 AD. It is interesting to note that the Vikings settled in Greenland around 974 AD and the study indicates that ice cap expansion began around 1015 AD.

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While the UC team that did the field work still has more work to do to reconstruct temperatures from this data, the study lends support to the idea that Greenland’s climate was warmer approximately 1000 years ago. One of the organic samples recovered at another location was dated to 910BC. This makes one wonder just how often shifts in Greenland’s climate occurs.

More study is needed, but this is certainly interesting. You can view the abstract here


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Categories : climate_change

Update: GOES12 is back online!

18 12 2007

After a near brush with death, GOES 12 is back up and running, our full disk image  is now 100% The loop may take some time to get synced but images are being produced from GOES 12 correctly now.


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Categories : Uncategorized

Told Ya So!

18 12 2007

As I blogged about earlier this year, Vista sucks. Now comes vindication of my views from PC World’s The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007 unsurprisingly, Windows Vista has been rated the most disappointing product of 2007.  It’s delicious irony that this OS runs best on an Apple Macbook. See below. Maybe Steve Ballmer will finally get a clue. Heck I might even start running Apple ads on this blog just to spite him. This from a guy who used to hate Macs with a passion, but now sees OSX as a better choice than Vista, and for some users, even Windows XP.

Here is the PC World article on #1:  

#1. No Wow, No How: Windows Vista

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Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?

It’s not that Vista is awful. The integrated security and parental controls are nice, and the Aero interface is as whizzy as it gets. Searching and wireless networking are much faster and easier than under XP.

It’s just that Vista isn’t all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring–like more efficient file and communications systems–got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP.

When it debuted last January, incompatibilities were rampant–in part because hardware and software makers didn’t feel any urgency to revamp their products to work with the new OS. The user account controls that were supposed to make users feel safer just made them feel irritated. And at $399 ($299 upgrade) for Windows Ultimate, we couldn’t help feeling more than a little gouged.

No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there’s something deeply wrong with the universe.

We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn’t have it pre-installed. And that’s disappointing in its own right.


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Categories : Technology

One more thing to worry about

18 12 2007

While we are all recovering from the news of the terrible fate that awaits us as outlined recently in Bali, astronomers have, for the first time, witnessed a super-massive black hole hitting a nearby galaxy with a “death-star-like” beam of energy.

The story also has a video with simulations, pictures, and explanations. “The ‘death star galaxy,’ as NASA astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in the wake of its destructive beam. Fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos.”

The deadly galaxy — the largest of two in a system known as 3C321 — is aiming the high-energy jet from its center at a smaller galaxy 20,000 light-years away from it, or roughly the distance from Earth to the Milky Way’s core. Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth. An artist’s conception is below:

A bright spot in a NASA composite image at the top of the article reveals that the beam is striking the edge of the smaller galaxy, deflecting the spindle of energy into intergalactic space. While not a direct hit, astronomers said the consequences are frightening.

But as they say, stuff happens, entropy occurs. And, it’s a reminder that we are nothing more than a fly speck on an elephants butt in the whole grand scheme of space, time, and energy.


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Categories : Science