[LINK] Weekend Magazine - Remote Siberian Lake Holds Clues to Arctic--and Antarctic--Climate Change

[TKoltai]

The National Science Foundation fund various "beneficial" Research
projects, like the Internet and Climate Change.
So when the NSF discover data indicating severe temperatures in past
"earths" we have a choice.

Either, (A) Earth is in a constant evolutionary cycle where several
civilisations have existed before us and been wiped out repeatedly just
as they managed to emit sufficient green house gases to force an
Extinction Level Event or... (B) Climate change models are missing a few
key elements.

It's other one or the other...

OK, I skipped one, the 'ALFO' theory... Let's call that(C).

On that basis, if the Federal Government insist on penalising us
fiscally for something that has been obviously occurring in cycles for
over a million years, then they are effectively confirming the existence
of prior advanced "hummer" driving civilisations.
Or, (C) Constant Alien Lifeforms Flying Objects (ALFO's) landings and
takeoffs have interfered with and heated up the ionosphere and the alien
lifeforms should be taxed.

Quote: [http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124565]
June 21, 2012

Intense warm climate intervals--warmer than scientists thought
possible--have occurred in the Arctic over the past 2.8 million years.

That result comes from the first analyses of the longest sediment cores
ever retrieved on land. They were obtained from beneath remote,
ice-covered Lake El'gygytgyn (pronounced El'gee-git-gin) ("Lake E") in
the northeastern Russian Arctic.

The journal Science published the findings this week.

They show that the extreme warm periods in the Arctic correspond closely
with times when parts of Antarctica were also ice-free and warm,
suggesting a strong connection between Northern and Southern Hemisphere
climate.

The polar regions are much more vulnerable to climate change than
researchers thought, say the National Science Foundation-(NSF) funded
Lake E project's co-chief scientists: Martin Melles of the University of
Cologne, Germany; Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of
Massachusetts Amherst; and Pavel Minyuk of Russia's North-East
Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute in Magadan.

The exceptional climate warming in the Arctic, and the inter-hemispheric
interdependencies, weren't known before the Lake E studies, the
scientists say.

Lake E was formed 3.6 million years ago when a huge meteorite hit Earth,
leaving an 11-mile-wide crater. It's been collecting layers of sediment
ever since.

The lake is of interest to scientists because it has never been covered
by glaciers. That has allowed the uninterrupted build-up of sediment at
the bottom of the lake, recording hitherto undiscovered information on
climate change.

Cores from Lake E go far back in time, almost 30 times farther than
Greenland ice cores covering the past 110,000 years.

The sediment cores from Lake El'gygytgyn reflect the climate and
environmental history of the Arctic with great sensitivity, say
Brigham-Grette and colleagues.

The physical, chemical and biological properties of Lake E's sediments
match the known global glacial/interglacial pattern of the ice ages.

Some warm phases are exceptional, however, marked by extraordinarily
high biological activity in the lake, well above that of "regular"
climate cycles.

To quantify the climate differences, the scientists studied four warm
phases in detail: the two youngest, called "normal" interglacials, from
12,000 years and 125,000 years ago; and two older phases, called "super"
interglacials, from 400,000 and 1.1 million years ago.

According to climate reconstructions based on pollen found in sediment
cores, summer temperatures and annual precipitation during the super
interglacials were about 4 to 5 degrees C warmer, and about 12 inches
wetter, than during normal interglacials.

The super interglacial climates suggest that it's nearly impossible for
Greenland's ice sheet to have existed in its present form at those
times.

Simulations using a state-of-the-art climate model show that the high
temperature and precipitation during the super interglacials can't be
explained by Earth's orbital parameters or variations in atmospheric
greenhouse gases alone, which geologists usually see as driving the
glacial/interglacial pattern during ice ages.

That suggests that additional climate feedbacks are at work.

"Improving climate models means that they will better match the data
that has been collected," says Paul Filmer, program director in NSF's
Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the "Lake E" project along with
NSF's Office of Polar Programs.

"The results of this collaboration among scientists in the U.S.,
Austria, Germany and Russia are providing a challenge for researchers
working on climate models: they now need to match results from
Antarctica, Greenland--and Lake El'gygytgyn."

Adds Simon Stephenson, director of the Division of Arctic Sciences in
NSF's Office of Polar Programs, "This is a significant result from NSF's
investment in frontier research during the recent International Polar
Year.

"'Lake E' has been a successful partnership in very challenging
conditions.  These results make a significant contribution to our
understanding of how Earth's climate system works, and improve our
understanding of what future climate might be like."

The scientists suspect the trigger for intense interglacials might lie
in Antarctica.

Earlier work by the international ANDRILL program discovered recurring
intervals when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted. (ANDRILL, or the
ANtarctic geological DRILLing project, is a collaboration of scientists
from five nations--Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and
the United States--to recover geologic records from the Antarctic
margin.)

The current Lake E study shows that some of these events match with the
super interglacials in the Arctic.

The results are of global significance, they believe, demonstrating
strong indications of an ongoing collapse of ice shelves around the
Antarctic Peninsula and at the margins of the West Antarctica Ice
Sheet--and a potential acceleration in the near future.

The Science paper co-authors discuss two scenarios for future testing
that could explain the Northern Hemisphere-Southern Hemisphere climate
coupling.

First, they say, reduced glacial ice cover and loss of ice shelves in
Antarctica could have limited formation of cold bottom water masses that
flow into the North Pacific Ocean and upwell to the surface, resulting
in warmer surface waters, higher temperatures and increased
precipitation on land.

Alternatively, disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may have
led to significant global sea level rise and allowed more warm surface
water to reach the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait.

Lake E's past, say the researchers, could be the key to our global
climate future.

The El'gygytgyn Drilling Project also was funded by the International
Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), the German Federal
Ministry for Education and Research, Alfred Wegener Institute,
GeoForschungsZentrum-Potsdam, the Russian Academy of Sciences Far East
Branch, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, and the Austrian
Ministry for Science and Research.

-NSF-
/Quote