´Medieval Warm Period should simply be named Medieval Period´

There is climatology and there is paleoclimatology. And then there is something in between. You thought yesterday´s trip to the early Pleistocene was geologically speaking exactly that, a trip to yesterday? Well, in that case today we go only a … Continue reading

Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary: did Eltanin asteroid kickstart the ice ages?

Sediment deposits along shores of Antarctica, New Zealand and Chile suggest over 2 million years ago something big must have plunged somewhere in the middle of that triangle, creating a mega tsunami with hundreds of meters high waves engulfing coastal … Continue reading

´Fewer wildfires in North America during Little Ice Age – due to climate cooling, not population decline´

Because cooler climates also tend to have lower evaporation, they tend to be moister climates, with not only moist air, but also moister (dead) biomass – and we all know wet twigs don’t burn too well…

Photo of the day: the old climate versus the new, according to Nature Geoscience study

The picture below shows Pinyon pine forests in New Mexico – and the progressive consequence of the large drought that hit western North America between 2000-2004. The left image is from 2002 and already shows some browning of pine trees halfway … Continue reading

Largest known sea level rise took less than 350 years

Ocean level rise is known as one of the most disquieting effects of global warming, with more than three billion people living on the coast or less than 200 kilometres land inward and one tenth of the world population living … Continue reading

Flatulent dinosaurs may have been a larger methane source than current human activities

The long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods that lived about 150 million years ago appear to have been rather flatulent. New calculations put the combined methane production of the hulking beasts at 520 million tonnes (Tg). As a comparison the … Continue reading

Grand Solar Minima do bring cooling to Europe Holocene record shows

But now it’s not dry and icy five-month winters, but wet and windy springs instead. Or would you say these combine?

Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum caused by thawing permafrost?

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.

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