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.”
“Sudden” should be defined as a period of time where people do not have time to react and adapt. Was the change in climate from the medieval warm period when Greenland began to freeze over so sudden that the occupants did not have time to react? No, they eventually had time to decide to get in their boats and leave the area. When in history was climate change so sudden that the occupants had no choice but to die because there was no time to react. Name just one?
A big meteor hitting the earth, that would be sudden.”Sudden” may happen if the Sun began to have an increased or decreased output of say 5 or 10%, over say a 1 year period, and a year or 2 later, the earth’s temperature rose or fell dramatically trapping people in ice storms or was killing people due to famine. What are the odds of this type of event happening given the history. 1 in 1 million? 1 in 10 million? I like those odds. The Sun and meteors are outside our sphere of influence and are nothing to fret over day in and day out a is CO2.
What are the true odds of sudden man-made climate shift due to everyday activity? 1 in 1 billion? I like those odds. No need for any policy changes given these odds. Carry on.
they also predict that there will be some decade-long, and even occasionally 15-year-long periods,…
Joel, I believe I read that at least one model (Hansen?) threw in a random decadal volcano which caused cooling of several years.
Is that what you think is occurring now?
Several years of cooling due to volcanos?
Joel Shore (19:00:43) : “…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…”
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But Joel, you are assuming that CO2 will cause a measurable change to climate…. This is not the case so far. The opposite is true actually, there is a large divergence in CO2 and Temperature for the last decade, when comparing the satellite temp record to CO2 rise.
Also, CO2 remains a very small trace gas in the Atmosphere . As far as GHG’s go, water Vapor is the most abundant GHG. Over 95% of the atmosphere’s GHG component is Water vapor.
I always liken anthropogenic CO2’s effect on climate to that of a fly sitting on the starboard railing of an ocean liner. A fly has mass, therefor it has an effect. But can you measure its effect on the stability of the ocean liner?….. No you can’t….. You can theorize its effect. But in natural conditions you will never be able to actually measure it with any certainty.
Nicely done P Wilson! Keep up the informative posts.
Joel Shore (19:00:43) :
“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 the opposite (assuming we must be responsible for “accelerating changes” ) is good logic??? How so ???
…. but I think you missed my point completely – separation of variables – show me where you have removed ALL other factors except CO2 in the temperature signal, then we can talk about the effect of CO2. The fact is we still don’t know or understand all the forcing mechanisms in our climate system & how they interact (feedback), so there is no way to logically put all the blame on CO2. When you subtract out potential forcing mechanisms (such as the PDO, ENSO, AMO, aerosols, solar(?) ) & look at the residual signal (which will have GHG’s + other forcings & feedbacks that we may or may not understand), what you see is the signal is pretty flat. See:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/TEMPSvsSUNvsPDOAMO.jpg
Bob Tisdale, I believe, has posted similar analysis on WUWT as well
I have done my own analysis of this (although I do not have a spot to post it on the web) & I find that the residual signal agrees quite well with Lindzen’s assessment of feedbacks & sensitivity wrt GHG’s of what the expected effect on global temps should be. See:
http://portaldata.colgate.edu/imagegallerywww/3503/ImageGallery/LindzenLectureBeyondModels.pdf
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/
So, I maintain that there are significant & poorly understood forcing mechanisms in our climate system, demonstrated in the geologic record, that could easily be at work in the time frame we are discussing (the last 100 yrs) and if that can’t addressed, then why are we contemplating drastic social and economic changes based on science that is totally incomplete?? THAT is bad logic.
Temps during this period were as much as 3.5C higher than today and CO2 levels were lower than most of the recent interglacial periods.
What we have is a lot of people who just parrot whatever an abstract says about climate history. Basically, the climate models skipped a lot of classes in Grades 2 and 3 when multiplication was discussed.
You can’t have periods when CO2 was 3 or 4 doublings higher than today when temperatures were about the same as today, and then say the CO2 sensitivity for the period is 3.0C to 6.0C per doubling.
You can’t have periods when CO2 was lower than today with temperatures 3.5C higher than today and say that is consistent with the propositions of global warming.
What happened during this specific period (27 million to 14 million years ago) is not clear but it was probably due to changes in the Earth’s Albedo. It is 0.298 today, and if it fell to 0.290, that would explain the estimated temperature without any changes in CO2.
Joel Shore (19:28:50)(19:35:32),
Joel me boy, you jumped in @18:39:04 and started critiquing me for a comment that I made to someone else. My answer certainly hit home, because you responded with two posts in a row about it.
From what I see, your main critique is with the time frame of the chart I posted:
“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.”
OK then, let’s look at a really long time frame showing the non-relationship between CO2 and temperature: click. See? There is no correlation even in a 4.6 billion year time scale.
As I pointed out before, you nitpick every chart I post. And I’ve posted hundreds. You just don’t like what they’re showing you: CO2 has little to no effect on the climate.
And if you don’t like either chart, I have several in between showing exactly the same thing. Then there’s this: click. Take it to heart. CO2 is a fart in a hurricane when it comes to influencing the planet. Someday you’ll understand. I hope.
michel (11:41:18) : “… The problem is, we may get climate fluctuations large enough to threaten us, and right now we have no idea what we would do about one.”
Because once too often the cry of Wolf! has been raised so that when a real alert is sounded it will fall on deaf ears; as Aesop warned us.
Lucy Skywalker,
Yup – geologist I am.
I’m not sure how deep the ice cap could be – apart from drilling, the only other method is seismic.
“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.”
And something lofting tons of seawater and pollen into the air towards the general direction of Antarctica is out of the realm of possibility…
I would be curious to see if this anomaly happened over a few seasons or instantaneously.
ot: GOREBAGE IN = GOREBAGE OUT
The important thing is to have a balanced program of climate study, and not to get that rejected because the current irrational program of recommendations for action based on AGW get rejected.
We do need climate studies going forwards. To argue otherwise is Luddism.
Jeff L (20:37:50)
“… separation of variables – show me where you have removed ALL other factors except CO2 in the temperature signal, then we can talk about the effect of CO2. The fact is we still don’t know or understand all the forcing mechanisms in our climate system & how they interact (feedback), so there is no way to logically put all the blame on CO2. …”
I would like to propose a convention to be used on WUWT:
We use the term “Climate Variation” (cV) to refer to all of the factors that *are not* caused by anthropogenic activity, and “Climate Deterioration” (cD) by those factors that *are*.
Thus cD would be defined as the sum of the atmospheric output from incense burning, cigarette smoking, SUV farts, garlic consumption, fish-head soup, underarm odor, and anything else that I personally feel to be objectionable in polite society.
>>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?
And I have to point out again that this paper indicates that CO2 absorbtion is at saturation levels already. Take a look at fig 3 – no matter how much more CO2 in the atmosphere, there will be no more warming. Any faults with this graph?
http://brneurosci.org/co2.html
.
And this paper says that CO2 levels were much higher in the 1940s.
http://www.biomind.de/nogreenhouse/daten/EE%2018-2_Beck.pdf
Any faults with this one?
.
SSam
“And something lofting tons of seawater and pollen into the air towards the general direction of Antarctica is out of the realm of possibility…”
Have a study of the Siwilak Hills in the foothills of the Himalayas and the fossil content of some of those sediments- a veritable melange of extinct fauna and fauna slammed against the Himalayas as a wet sediment – but not out of the realm of possibility because it actually happened.
Same goes for the Alaskan and Siberian muck deposits – of Pleistocene age.
And then our ancestors had something to say about catastrophes as well, but as Lyell showed, those too are out of realm of possibility….
Or were they.
They need to keep drilling. Maybe they will find some oil and gas and make a profit. They need to shoot some seismic and see how far the extent of this warmer climate layer extends. Interesting.
Jack Green (05:12),
There is probably some oil and gas at Antarctica but not as much as other places on the planet.
Antarctica is the unlucky continent in the sense that continental drift has left it around the south pole for most of the last 500 million years.
It has been a little farther north, it has been on the Pacific side, it has been on the Indian ocean side, it was locked together with other continents over the south pole three different times.
It has been glaciated over on at least 5 separate periods of time lasting tens of million of years in the geologic past when most of the oil and gas was forming.
Anybody know how they date this stuff?
Who’s to say that the whole thing didn’t melt of 15k years ago and the depositions rates are just much higher than anticipated. Hey, it happened to Glacier gal. They expected a few feet, and got over 200.
Aaaahhh! Another “proof” for them that Global Warming will bring about a new Ice Age…
Some facts may be useful, considering the wild speculation on this thread.
First, this an example of press release science. This is interesting, but in no way sensational. It has long been known that there was a (last) fairly mild interval in Antarctica in the Miocene, sometime more than 14 million years ago. This is known from the Meyer Desert Formation of the Sirius Group which contains fossils from this “warm” interval.
I put “warm” in citation marks because it was only warm compared to modern climate in Antarctica. Climate was arctic, but only moderately so. Conditions must have been somewhat like on Greenland and Spitzbergen today for details see for example:
http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/ashworth/ashworth_cantrill_2004.pdf
Now these results are important for two reasons, first the orthodox version has been that the Meyer Desert Formation is of Pliocene age, based on rather questionable biostratigraphic data, despite the fact that 14 million year old completely unweathered volcanic deposits in the dry valleys of Victoria land shows that climate has not been much warmer than now during this interval. See for example:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1047/ea/of2007-1047ea071.pdf
The new results seems to definitely pin down the last warm interval in Antarctica as being mid-Miocene.
The second interesting point is that the “warm” layer is only 2 meters thick. This suggests that the warm interval was more on the lines of a “super-interglacial” rather than a long warm interval (as occurred elsewhere in the World during the mid-Miocene).
A few points on some of the speculation in this thread:
Large scale glaciation in Antarctica is at least 35 million years old, the Oli-1 glaciation at that time was the first to reach the coast on a large scale, but there was presumably inland glaciation earlier (the oldest definitely known glacial deposits are mid Eocene). Ice cores only cover a very small part of the time Antarctica has been frozen, hence the reason for the ANDRIL project.
About dating: the area where the ANDRIL cores have been drilled is volcanic, which means that ash beds in the cores can be radiometrically dated.
John M: “I believe that the current average summer temperature in Antarctica is 2 degrees Celsius”
Your belief is quite unfounded. In most of Antarctica it is more like -20 degrees Celsius. Average summer temperatures above zero only occurs near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Have a look here for example:
http://www.weather.nps.navy.mil/~psguest/polarmet/climate/antmap.html
Scott’s question about the rate of the Antarctic temperature increase is important and deserves an answer.
From what I’ve learned from the documentary “day after tomorrow” I believe that we’re talking about 10C in 14 hours, or in that ballpark.
Smokey, I don’t think that Joel can see that he is just parrotting “authority” and perhaps it makes him feel good to tell himself he’s tried to corrall the sheeple and the deniers into better science.
I think Joel has no idea, perhaps does not even want to face the hypothesis, that (even needing NO “conspiracy”) agenda-driven research could have corrupted the scientific process so radically, so deeply, and in such widely different corners of Climate Science. Neither does he face the possibility that many other scientists beside himself could still be either unaware of, or unable to speak up about, the possibility of a corruption of science that may have happened for innocent reasons. Corruption can arise now because specialists no longer understand each other so they trust and believe instead of auditing the science. Thus arises the situation where a majority of scientists can disbelieve real experts like Moerner and trust IPCC instead. A situation that reminds me of the tragedy of King Lear.
quote: And something lofting tons of seawater and pollen into the air towards the general direction of Antarctica is out of the realm of possibility…
Not knowing if you were really serious, or not I got an itch to check out extraterrestrial objects, and to my surprise there was a reference to the Patagonian meteor craters. You can even see them on Google. With the Patagonian meteor strike depressions, it might be interesting to ask if there were orbiting debris which just might have the right trajectory to do exactly that.
Just how often has the Earth rung like a gong after being hit?
Tom in Texas:
The short answer is NO. The climate model projections into the future do not have volcanic eruptions and that is not what is responsible for the negative temperature trends one can get over cherry-picked intervals recently. The main cause is likely simply the moderately-strong La Nina we had recently, although there might also be some contribution from the solar cycle minimum.
(You are correct that Hansen put in volcanic eruptions in 2 of the three scenarios that he showed back in 1988 http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/pics/0108_annual_mean.jpg …although in Scenario A he did not and you can see that the temperatures still do not increase monotonically even in this model, which is presumably pretty crude by modern standards.)
Bill Illis says:
Well, actually you can. You only couldn’t if CO2 concentration was the ONLY thing that mattered for climate. On the geological timescales that you are talking about, there are a lot of other important things to consider, such as the irradiance of the sun, the amount of volcanic activity, the locations of the continents and mountain ranges and ocean currents, etc., etc.
However, it is also true that we don’t have very good ways of accurately determining CO2 levels (and to some degree, temperatures) as we go back beyond the ice core record (which currently means more than 750,000 years). And, we also don’t have very good temporal resolution on what measurements / estimates we do have. This is probably why your conclusions are at odds with the people who actually study this.
Smokey says:
There are about 8 orders of magnitude between looking on the scale of a decade or less and the scale of billions of years. You might try not going to one extreme or the other.
It looks to me that there is in fact some degree of correlation between CO2 and temperature on that graph, although admittedly there is other stuff going on too. So, here are some questions a REAL skeptic might ask about that graph: (1) Where is that data from and how accurate is it believed to be? (2) What is the temporal resolution? (3) What others things are changing over those sorts of timescales that might have a significant effect on climate? (4) What has led scientists who actually study paleoclimatology for a living to conclude that CO2 plays a very important role in past climates?
J. Hansford:
(1) Because they absorb differently in different parts of the spectrum, simply comparing the amount of two greenhouse gases is a very poor way of estimating their relative effects. Nonetheless, it is true that water vapor is the most important gas in producing the ~33 C natural greenhouse effect. It is also true that the concentration of water vapor is determined by the climate, with more water vapor as the climate warms, and hence it acts as a positive feedback on warming produced by something else such as the long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2.
And, you get this notion from where exactly? Certainly not from actually computing the radiative forcing due to a change in CO2 levels. You can liken it to anything you want but unless you have evidence to back up this analogy, it tells us nothing beyond the thought processes in your own mind.