From a Louisiana State University Press Release Oct 1, 2009
Algae and Pollen Grains Provide Evidence of Remarkably Warm Period in Antarctica’s History
Palynomorphs from sediment core give proof to sudden warming in mid-Miocene era
The ANDRILL drilling rig in Antarctica
For Sophie Warny, LSU assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, years of patience in analyzing Antarctic samples with low fossil recovery finally led to a scientific breakthrough. She and colleagues from around the world now have proof of a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years.
Last year, as Warny was studying samples sent to her from the latest Antarctic Geologic Drilling Program, or ANDRILL AND-2A, a multinational collaboration between the Antarctic Programs of the United States (funded by the National Science Foundation), New Zealand, Italy and Germany, one sample stood out as a complete anomaly.
“First I thought it was a mistake, that it was a sample from another location, not Antarctica, because of the unusual abundance in microscopic fossil cysts of marine algae called dinoflagellates. But it turned out not to be a mistake, it was just an amazingly rich layer,” said Warny. “I immediately contacted my U.S. colleague, Rosemary Askin, our New Zealand colleagues, Michael Hannah and Ian Raine, and our German colleague, Barbara Mohr, to let them know about this unique sample as each of our countries had received a third of the ANDRILL samples.”
Some colleagues had noted an increase in pollen grains of woody plants in the sample immediately above, but none of the other samples had such a unique abundance in algae, which at first gave Warny some doubts about potential contamination.
“But the two scientists in charge of the drilling, David Harwood of University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and Fabio Florindo of Italy, were equally excited about the discovery,” said Warny. “They had noticed that this thin layer had a unique consistency that had been characterized by their team as a diatomite, which is a layer extremely rich in fossils of another algae called diatoms.”
All research parties involved met at the Antarctic Research Facility at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Together, they sampled the zone of interest in great detail and processed the new samples in various labs. One month later, the unusual abundance in microfossils was confirmed.
Among the 1,107 meters of sediments recovered and analyzed for microfossil content, a two-meter thick layer in the core displayed extremely rich fossil content. This is unusual because the Antarctic ice sheet was formed about 35 million years ago, and the frigid temperatures there impede the presence of woody plants and blooms of dinoflagellate algae.
“We all analyzed the new samples and saw a 2,000 fold increase in two species of fossil dinoflagellate cysts, a five-fold increase in freshwater algae and up to an 80-fold increase in terrestrial pollen,” said Warny. “Together, these shifts in the microfossil assemblages represent a relatively short period of time during which Antarctica became abruptly much warmer.”
These palynomorphs, a term used to described dust-size organic material such as pollen, spores and cysts of dinoflagellates and other algae, provide hard evidence that Antarctica underwent a brief but rapid period of warming about 15 million years before present.
LSU’s Sophie Warny and her New Zealand colleague, Mike Hannah, sampling the ANDRILL cores at the Antarctic Research Facility.
“This event will lead to a better understanding of global connections and climate forcing, in other words, it will provide a better understanding of how external factors imposed fluctuations in Earth’s climate system,” said Harwood. “The Mid-Miocene Climate Optimum has long been recognized in global proxy records outside of the Antarctic region. Direct information from a setting proximal to the dynamic Antarctic ice sheets responsible for driving many of these changes is vital to the correct calibration and interpretation of these proxy records.”
These startling results will offer new insight into Antarctica’s climatic past – insights that could potentially help climate scientists better understand the current climate change scenario.
“In the case of these results, the microfossils provide us with quantitative data of what the environment was actually like in Antarctica at the time, showing how this continent reacted when climatic conditions were warmer than they are today,” said Warny.
According to the researchers, these fossils show that land temperatures reached a January average of 10 degrees Celsius – the equivalent of approximately 50 degrees Fahrenheit – and that estimated sea surface temperatures ranged between zero and 11.5 degrees Celsius. The presence of freshwater algae in the sediments suggests to researchers that an increase in meltwater and perhaps also in rainfall produced ponds and lakes adjacent to the Ross Sea during this warm period, which would obviously have resulted in some reduction in sea ice.
These findings most likely reflect a poleward shift of the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere, which would have pushed warmer water toward the pole and allowed a few dinoflagellate species to flourish under such ice-free conditions. Researchers believe that shrub-like woody plants might also have been able to proliferate during an abrupt and brief warmer time interval.
“An understanding of this event, in the context of timing and magnitude of the change, has important implications for how the climate system operates and what the potential future response in a warmer global climate might be,” said Harwood. “A clear understanding of what has happened in the past, and the integration of these data into ice sheet and climate models, are important steps in advancing the ability of these computer models to reproduce past conditions, and with improved models be able to better predict future climate responses.”
While the results are certainly impressive, the work isn’t yet complete.
“The SMS Project Science Team is currently looking at the stratigraphic sequence and timing of climate events evident throughout the ANDRILL AND-2A drillcore, including those that enclose this event,” said Florindo. “A broader understanding of ice sheet behavior under warmer-than-present conditions will emerge.”
Obama would immediately zoom back to godlike status if he came out soon on TV and said; Man-made Global warming and Climate change are a scam. New evidence proves the theory is not sound.
The unquestioning proles, they would be in awe at the prophet. To the questioning, Watts up with that? To all others, grinding, and weeping, and gnashing of teath.
Iren (15:02:11),
In the geologic past, atmospheric CO2 levels were many times higher than today’s, for hundreds of millions of years at a time. The oceans never became acidic.
Irene,
“But now we realise the situation is much worse. The water will become so acidic it will actually dissolve the shells of living shellfish.”
Thats just the this.
“There is a view we should not scare people because it makes them go down their burrows and close the door but I think the situation is so serious that although people are afraid they are not fearful enough given the science,” he said. “Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6253912/Most-people-in-denial-over-climate-change-according-to-psychologists.html
“Smokey (15:10:41)
In the geologic past, atmospheric CO2 levels were many times higher than today’s, for hundreds of millions of years at a time. The oceans never became acidic.”
I believe you but, nevertheless, this is being set up as the next panic button and it would be really nice if someone could break through the media blockade to let people know. Lord Monckton has already well and truly debunked this but how many people know that?
Re: Lucy Skywalker (11:11:04)
Ocean sediment cores contain the fossils of creatures with carbonate shells. Using this fossil carbonate the ratio of O18 to O16 can be found. This ratio can give an estimate of how much O16 is locked up in ice and can be used to infer ice volumes.
As far as I know the onset of Antarctic glaciation announces itself in sediment cores as an increase in the O18/O16 ratio.
This site gives a pretty good primer:
http://people.hofstra.edu/J_B_Bennington/137notes/paleoclimatology.html
Has anybody asked the most important question?
What time frame is considered as “sudden” here? Are the authors referring to decades, centuries, millenia?
This enquiring mind wishes to know.
Louis, ha, thanks, I guess I was fishing for something of that kind. You’re a geologist aren’t you by training? So you would have reasonably grounded suspicions about other geological proxies that might really need re-examining? I knew about the Hapgood (?) map apparently showing Antarctica free of ice. I’m also open to catastrophisms, there seems to be perfectly reasonable geological evidence for these at rather regular intervals.
Anyway, the matter in hand… 800,000 year old Epica ice goes down over 3 km? how much deeper does the ice go?
Scott A. Mandia (15:48:23) :
From above
I believe that the current average summer temperature in Antarctica is 2 degrees Celsius. So at the “alarming” rate of heating of 0.15 degree/decade reported by Steig et al. (give or take a tenth of a degree or so), looks like we have about 500 years to get there. Would you consider that sudden?
thats an intersting question Scott Mandia.
Prior to the 1990’s climatologists had a consensus that the climate changed very slowly over centuries.
They had a shocker when ancient ice revealed that climatic upheavels could take place over a very short period of time, such as 10 years.
This latter principle was seized upon by politicians and economists to make us responsible for perturbations in the long term climate, whilst simultaneously telling us all that the former proposition – that climate changes very slowly over centuries – was the case until the late 20th century
It’s interesting science, but I think it’s applicability to the current AGW debate is somewhat limited.
As a geoscientist, this is why I have been skeptical from day 1 (and most geoscientists I know fall in the same catagory). There is so much data in the geological literature (this article included) showing past dramatic climate changes with no help from mankind, yet now, supposedly everything is due to man made CO2 – as if somehow all the processes of the past (what ever they may be) somehow dont operate anymore. Why would anyone think that? Nothing has changed & all the same processes are at work & unless you can seperate these “other” processes from CO2 forcing, the CO2 hypothesis is hollow at best. I mean, come on, this is science 101 – separation of variables! The fact that the CO2 hypothesis has got as far as it has is truely astounding & disappointing.
… but of course, what do geologists know about climatology & how dare we assert that we have something to add to the debate!! I better stop right here because my next sentence would certainly be
Maybe this event could help get us some exposure. Bring your signs. My sign will say, It’s the Sun Stupid!
March on the Media – Operation Can You Hear Us Now?
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/109730#comment-1195816
And then there is the obvious:
If the Jet Stream went south to Antarctica, it didn’t go where it used to go.
The warmth thus transported to the icy continent was previously destined for other places.
Those places didn’t get thier warm jet stream.
They got colder.
So, if Antartica warms up, someplace else freezes over.
Nice.
Save the cheering for when they hit the bedrock in thier borehole. Who knows what other surprises are down there. Volanic warming?
So, if the Arctic melts because of jet streams shifting, where does that leave the continental areas?
Santa Claus gets an Ark, and Canada and Europe get a Laurentide Paving job.
Scott A. Mandia (15:48:23) :
“Has anybody asked the most important question?
What time frame is considered as “sudden” here? Are the authors referring to decades, centuries, millenia?
This enquiring mind wishes to know.”
Don’t know. What would you consider to be sudden? Would you consider the warming over the last 150 years to be sudden?
If you study ice data from Greenland or Vostok, what emerges is that within our de-glaciation (15,000years) the climate had rapid spikes of warmth, then sudden plunges back into bitter cold within decades
“Roughly 14,700 years ago the weather patterns that bring snow to Greenland shifted from one year to the next—a pattern of abrupt change that was repeated 12,900 years ago and 11,700 years ago when the earth’s climate became the one enjoyed today—according to records preserved in an ice core taken from the northern island. These speedy changes—transitions from warming to cooling and back again—could presage abrupt, catastrophic climate change in our future.
What made these abrupt climate changes were circulation changes, and these changes took place from one year to the next more or less,” says glaciologist Sune Olander Rasmussen of the Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, who was part of a team that analyzed annual data from ice tubes extracted from as deep as 10,000 feet (3,085 meters) beneath the ice sheet, which were collected by the North Greenland Ice Core Project, a drilling expedition.
Following this abrupt shift, as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) of warming occurred over the subsequent decades—a change that ultimately resulted in at least 33 feet (10 meters) of sea-level rise as the ice melted on Greenland.
Greenland can change quickly, even living up to its name, according to another paper in this week’s Science. Sediment cores from the ocean show that forests of spruce and even fern grew on Greenland just 125,000 years ago. That means Greenland’s ice sheet—potentially responsible for as much as 75 feet (23 meters) of sea-level rise if it all melts—has grown and shrunk far more frequently than previously known.
“The question that arises from such findings is: How come the Greenland ice sheet at such a low latitude has remained so stable during the present interglacial [period] until now?” says study co-author and geochemist Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Understanding that threat may require traveling even farther back in time via ice, to the transition to the last such warm period 130,000 years ago—the Eemian—when it was nine degrees F (five degrees C) warmer across Greenland. An ice core, known as NEEM (for North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling), that could address that question is being extracted now as part of the ongoing International Polar Year. “The circulation changes in a few years. The temperature change is happening over decades,” Rasmussen notes.
The idea of a stable climate is a myth, even in our holocene climate. It is odd, given proxies that show very considerable and abrupt climate upheavel in avery short time period, that we are et the moment in what seems a stable climate. ertainly the climate has gone up and down with us as though we weren’t here. What is interesting is that nothing in the last100 years shows a deviation from natural variability: In fact the warmming of the last 30 years, contrary to Mann, Briffa et al, looks slightly below natural variability and magnitude.
Scott A. Mandia (15:48:23) :
“Has anybody asked the most important question? What time frame is considered as ‘sudden’ here?”
That is far from the most important question, as it refers to pre-SUV climate change.
The most important question in the entire debate is this: Does the minor trace gas CO2 regulate the climate to the extent that a rise will bring about runaway global warming?
I notice that lately the alarmist crowd has been avoiding that question. Could that be because there is no evidence supporting it, outside of always-inaccurate climate models?
What say you? Will a rise in CO2 from 4 parts in ten thousand to 5 parts in ten thousand cause runaway global warming? And if so, how, exactly?
Keep in mind that as CO2 continues to rise, the planet’s temperature continues to fall.
Yeah and our little o’l NZ could do with a sudden warming of its own.
http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/content/snow-falls-across-lower-north-island-towns
I have to second that, Smokey. It’s interesting to study temp and c02 correlations from Vostok and greenland. At no time did c02 ever amplify the temperature on close inspection of what available data there is.
Here I thought this sudden warm-up in the Antarctic was due to dinosaurs, uh, breaking wind, when my wife reminded me that with the exception of the Loch Ness Monster and Barney, dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.
On the other hand, there were some pretty big animals around in the Miocene, too. Some giant rhino that was 16 feet high and 30 feet long. Must have been him driving a giant Hummer that also went extinct.
Bill Illis says:
So, are you telling me that you have CO2 data with at least millenial resolution going back at least 15 million years!?! Pray tell, where did you get this data?!?
P Wilson says:
That’s not what the scientists who have actually obtained and studied the data think.
Iren says:
What Smokey has told you here is a “red herring”. The reason that the ocean acidifies is that the acidification reactions due to the increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere happen at a rate faster than the rate at which limestone can be dissolved from rocks into the oceans to neutralize things. So, it is the ***RATE*** of rise of CO2 and not the absolute level that is important.
And, by the way, there is a past event that had a large rapid release of GHGs and led to a sharp warming and also to acidification of the oceans and to some dramatic extinctions. It is called the “PETM” (Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum) event and occurred about 55 million years ago. There has been a lot of study of it recently since it may be about the closest analogy found to our current “experiment” (although being that it was so long ago, I don’t think there is sufficient time resolution to tell if the rate of GHG release was really as rapid as it is now). Here is one article about it http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5728/1611 and you can look at the listed articles that have cited it to find even more recent studies.
Jeff L says:
The point is simply one of timescales. Yes, dramatic changes can occur…but unless there is something like a major asteroid impact or a supervolcano in the next century, the largest perturbation to the climate system is going to be from the increase in CO2 levels by a significant amount. (Without serious attempts to constrain our releases, CO2 will easily double pre-industrial levels and probably go a lot higher than that.)
The fact is that the climate has generally changed only slowly over the last ~ 10,000 years (i.e., during the Holocene…and excluding some rapid changes near the beginning of the Holocene like the Younger Dryas event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas that likely were caused by large events associated with the melting of the land ice sheets).
And, by the way, it is through the intelligent analysis of past events that we have come to understand the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to various changes in radiative forcing. Simply saying, “Climate has changed rapidly in the past; therefore, there is no reason to believe we are responsible for the accelerating changes that we are seeing now” is bad logic…and is in fact contrary to what scientists have learned from studying past events.
Intelligent thoughts from geologists and geophysicists are welcome and, in fact, the American Geophysical Union and many of its members play a very important role in the study of climate change. This Wikipedia page gives you various statements of scientific organizations on climate change, including various geology or geophysical organizations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change
Joel Shore says that all these folks are wrong except Joel himself:
Bill Illis (10:33:49)
Smokey (15:10:41)
P Wilson (16:04:47)
See, we’re all completely wrong, as usual, and Joel Shore has a corner on the truth. This has been the pattern for so long that I despair of Joel ever getting up the nerve to write an article for WUWT. Taking his inaccurate, half thought out potshots from the sidelines is more fun.
But Joel always ducks the central issue: as CO2 continues to rise, the planet’s temperature continues to decline. Maybe some day a miracle will occur: the scales will fall from Joel’s eyes, and he will see what the planet is clearly telling him.
Smokey:
I’ve never ducked this issue. I have explained it to you about 30 times. Shall we go for 31? Looking at global temperature trend over intervals of around a decade and less to determine the response to rising CO2 is like looking at temperatures in Rochester over a week-long period to determine the seasonal cycle. Any reasonable calculation of a trend will also include the errorbars in the trend…and the errorbars in the global temperature trend over a decade-long period are still huge. Hence, the negative trend one can get by cherrypicking certain periods of around that length are not statistically-significant. Is this really that hard to understand?
And, you know those climate models that you don’t like because you think they are not realistic models of the real climate system? Well, when they are run with steadily-increasing greenhouse gases, they also predict that there will be some decade-long, and even occasionally 15-year-long periods, with a (statistically-insignficant) negative temperature trend: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/csi/images/GRL2009_ClimateWarming.pdf
Smokey, I think you are pretty much “Exhibit A” as to why it might be a waste of my time to ever write an article for WUWT. Why should I say things if you are simply going to ignore them? You don’t even attempt to respond with intelligent, coherent arguments…You just go back and repeat the same mantras over and over again! Believe me, if I ever do write an article, it will be for the people around here who are at least willing to read what I write and respond to what I am actually saying.
Smokey says:
This deserves a specific response because I think the implication here, that I am somehow being arrogant, is really quite a strange interpretation of how things unfold on this website. What I am telling you here are not my own original ideas about climate. I am simply explaining, as best I understand them, the results of the scientists who are actually working and actively publishing in the field. It seems rather strange to me that this would be considered somehow immodest while it would not be considered immodest for people, many (although not all) of whom have read very little of the peer-reviewed literature in the field, to presume to understand climate science better than those who have spent much of their professional career studying it.
….. But did they find oil?
Pointless drilling holes if you’re not going to find something worthwhile;-)