So these winter hellscapes of Scandinavia are going to become even worse and they’re basically going to be inundated with clouds of mosquitoes for more of the year now. Thank god for their extremely attractive people because otherwise all of that would be a shit hole.
Most mainland Norway ice was gone during the holocene climatic optimum (9–6 thousand years ago), and glaciers recovered since then (until approx the 20th century, when deglaciation started accelerating again).
No, it's not wrong or we wouldn't be finding 5K year old instruments underneath melted glaciers as this article's evidence shows. And ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica support this.
Without taking a position I will point out that your stated reasoning doesn't hold due to how much momentum these systems have and how slowly they respond. It seems entirely plausible that this outcome would still have happened if temperatures had plateaued several years ago.
Do you also wait until the inside of the meat is the temperature you want before taking it off the grill, then are later surprised when it is overcooked?
The glacial cycle was longer duration, lower fluctuation.
Glaciers don't melt instantly the moment the temperature flips from "form glaciers" to "melt glaciers". They operate on the integral of temperature -- heat. The temperature determines how fast they melt or form.
What's most impressive to me is how razor sharp the slate arrowhead they show in the top photo is. I've seen photos of many stone age arrowheads but they are usually much more dull and blunted.
That's because they weren't exposed to the weather as much. Essentially these were 'shrinkwrapped' in nature's own version of Cosmoline. No bacteria, no free oxygen. Once did this with a rose to see how long it would last and it basically was perfect until we moved house. Many years and not even the slightest change, it didn't even lose color.
It's not so easy to freeze something that large without getting defects in the crystal due to different rates of freezing, to do that properly will be a major engineering project. But I'd love to see you succeed with that.
That's part of the story. The petroleum based part will go in a few years, what remains is the protective layer of wax that matters. I've bought some military surplus stuff that was coated in it, at first I didn't know what it was and then once I found out about it (and how to remove it) I was super impressed by how effective it is in preserving all kinds of materials from time's teeth. In particular these were parts for a 1940s vehicle, NOS that came out of the covering as though made the other day.
I'm slightly surprised they're just holding these artefacts with bare hands. I thought that was generally a no-no for dealing with objects untouched for thousands of years
Conservationists and archivists (sometimes) use gloves on cleaned samples, but not archaeologists. An archaeologist wearing gloves is almost certainly just cold.
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
> no real reason [...] still coated in whatever was floating around the environment
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archive pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for DNA?"? At what point in automated lab tech progress, does "handled, dusted, washed, shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
Nowadays they don’t in fact brush off artifacts immediately upon extraction, just clear them of large clumps of dirt. Precisely because the fragile remains of paint and whatever else might have been stuck to them can often teach us more than the artifact itself.
That one notch further on the spectrum that’s being described. Will “clear large chunks of dirt in the field” be found to have damaged information? Is there genuinely nothing to learn from the chunks of dirt? Or is it still too expensive to pay attention?
We can only understand the coarsest information available in the soil. Any particular cubic centimeter has thousands of completely undocumented bacterial taxa, miles of fungal threads, organic residues left behind by higher lifeforms, etc. Each bit of soil is essentially unique.
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, alone alone anything more expensive.
> To be clear, so far some of the oldest ice found is over 6 million years old...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
still blows my mind that there is debate about the origin of Water on earth and much of it is still attributed to the formation of the solar system and as much as 30% to 50% of the water we drink is older than the sun (4.6B years old)
Sure, our actions and inaction regarding climate change is threatening the very future of humanity, but we're going to learn so much about human history in the process!
Not really true, many countries made moves. It didn't help that the US was/is being a gigantic ignorant petulant child about the whole situation, signaling to the rest of the world that we were going to make meaningful emission reduction an uphill battle.
Over the past few decades harm was done to the advancement of things that err toward environmental sustainability by self professed "environmentalists" who were just dishonest swindlers selling the current snake oil. Trading away huge amounts of economic or political/social sustainability for middling amounts of environmental sustainability isn't progress except in the narrowest most irrelevant to actual reality way. You'd think that a bunch of technologists who can spot a "I've saved a bunch of memory at the expense of processing time" or "our startup is profitable if you use questionably honest spreadsheet math that ignores some elephants in the room" a mile away would have called out those people and what they peddled.
Being out of the news and not having hordes of people trying to ride it's coat tails in a "look at me, I'm a do-gooder too" fashion and trying to push it in various directions for their own gain is the best thing that could happen to it. Let the tech be advanced in the background in an economically and politically sustainable manner even if slightly slower.
> Over the past few decades harm was done to the advancement of things that err toward environmental sustainability by self professed "environmentalists" who were just dishonest swindlers selling the current snake oil.
Are you talking about carbon credits? Electric cars have probably helped, even though there are trade offs. Solar has been a net positive.
Nah. For centuries up to the 1850s, climate was looking pretty dicy. The little ice age, had it gone on, might have represented a return a big ice age.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
I wonder if there were any climate change alarmists around 20,000 years ago; telling everyone that the planet was doomed if those mile-deep glaciers covering New York ever melted?
Even if they knew it, climate change on the scale we're experiencing today wouldn't be as big of an issue for them because their populations were tiny and entirely self sufficient by hunting and gathering from local sources.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
Ancient bacteria will be surprised to encounter penicillin. Viruses are less resistant to degradation. But, yeah, it's nothing to look forward to, horizontal gene transfer and all.
So this means these areas were once not ice covered? Does this mean the area is returning to what it was a thousand years ago? And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
> And, back then, this was the normal or is ice covering the normal?
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
6000 years ago was about the time of the last interglacial period so likely it was ice free at that time.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Yes, and the whole world economy is based on the climate we've had the last couple hundred years. A lot of people are going to die, because we refuse to wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
I'm all for decarbonization, but 'refuse' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. These are very hard problems with a lot of people working on them. Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too.
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
Investment in decarbonization is vast and has been for decades. Even in Trump's America.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
Reading the comments on any sort of environment adjacent news on this website is like a form of self torture. You'd think having access to a large corpus of humanity's written knowledge could help, but it seems like it's making it worse.
The entire problem is that this website is so hyper-focused on curiosity. Which seems to be not a good thing when taken to this limit in some cases, because you get a bunch of people who become conditioned to hide in their inner world of mental stimulation, rather than actually caring about what they're reading.
It's basically a website to stimulate the good feelings that come from absorbing information, which creates a sort of pathological behaviour in most of the participants.
I mean, you just wouldn't find a gathering like this in real life. Debate and discussion here happens merely for the entertainment and distraction of those using it, and the information and news presented here becomes like a fictional version of real life, except that the fictional is actually real.
While the intentions of this website might be good, I think in the long run it just further promotes the behaviour of hiding away from the world, and as a result is a net negative to those who use it.
87 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadGlaciers don't melt instantly the moment the temperature flips from "form glaciers" to "melt glaciers". They operate on the integral of temperature -- heat. The temperature determines how fast they melt or form.
These melted really, really fast.
Ironically it's made of petroleum, which is the decayed remains of prehistoric organisms.
??? The wax is petroleum, just the heavier parts.
I envy you, it means you haven't read Semper Fi by W.E.B. Griffin yet.
And the wood of the arrow would be gone otherwise.
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/minersoc/books/edited-volum...
There's no real reason to immediately protect the find from light handling when it's discovered. It's a dirty object that's still coated in whatever was floating around the environment for those thousands of years. The rock will be fine and probably handled multiple times before it gets back to an archive.
I think the only times I've worn gloves in the field were for a very rusty metal dagger and some especially sensitive human remains.
I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archive pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases?
Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for DNA?"? At what point in automated lab tech progress, does "handled, dusted, washed, shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?
Moreover, just being in the general vicinity is enough for us to leave behind contamination, since humans (and all other animals) constantly shed detectable eDNA into the environment. And even if they wanted to deal with this complexity, the budget for an entire project's archaeological testing is often less than my coworkers' monthly token budgets. You might get less than a dozen radioisotope, TL, or dendro tests for the entire thing, alone alone anything more expensive.
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/six-million-year-old-ice-d...
And they're working on finding even older!
"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031"
One of the presentations was on this research, and I was somewhat amazed the new stretch goal is to find 10 million year old ice. More power to them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth
AI is in.
We don't have to be slaves to unregulated markets or the oligarchs they naturally breed.
Being out of the news and not having hordes of people trying to ride it's coat tails in a "look at me, I'm a do-gooder too" fashion and trying to push it in various directions for their own gain is the best thing that could happen to it. Let the tech be advanced in the background in an economically and politically sustainable manner even if slightly slower.
Are you talking about carbon credits? Electric cars have probably helped, even though there are trade offs. Solar has been a net positive.
The heroic efforts of early industrialists adding carbon to the atmosphere avoided this calamity and set us up with a level of comfy and productive climate unknown in the quaternary.
Amazing how humanity keeps lucking out like this.
Today's bloated world population, completely reliant on mass agriculture only made possible by stable climate patterns, isn't so lucky. A fact your cheeky, inch deep provocative comment entirely ignores.
"Normal" is probably not a very useful framing. We're currently in an interglacial period in an ice age. So, on one scale we'd expect ice there, on one scale we'd not. On another scale we're just waiting for the sun to swallow the Earth and burn it all away. What's "normal" out of that?
If you happen to be asking if the current human-caused warming is an issue, yes it is. The Earth doesn't care, and "normal" doesn't care. We do though, we're fucking up our environment pretty good and it's causing misery and death.
As was stated "normal" is not really a useful framing. It has at various times been both "normal" for the glaciers to extend much further south, and it has also been "normal" for the earth to have no glaciers at all. When thinking about climate change the issue is not that the climate IS changing, but rather how quickly. There is no evidence that global climate has ever changed as quickly as it is today, with the fastest rates we have evidence for being on the order of 1 degree every thousand years, as compared to the current rate of about 1 degree per 50 years.
Of course that's mostly going to be poor people, and it's really hard to get rich people to care about that.
> Dropping fossil fuels today would kill people too
Wean and drop are pretty different. Many US citizens and Republican politicians have shown less than 0 interest in making progress and the Trump administration in particular has actively sabotaged the effort.
The US, a nation in huge debt, is committed to around $1T in tax subsidies and $500B in loans and other funding for clean energy in the next decade. Private capital investment in that same time will account for another several trillion - driven by these subsidies and the regulations which force industry to adapt (and because clean solutions are genuinely cheaper in many applications).
The government tax subsidies and direct spending (depending on tax projections) are on the order of 5-10% of the discretionary budget (around 2-3 times the annual 'extra' cost above baseline of assisting Ukraine or bombing Iran Feb-Oct which are each on the order of $50B). It's hard to get an exact number of course, since 'funding which decreases carbon emissions' extends way beyond clean energy and electrification. For example, Defense Production Act may be used to fund manufacturing or refining capacity in key areas.
That's a long way from 'refusal' and represents only one country.
Public and private combined, the EU is investing at about the same rate as US, China is investing on the order of about double the rate of the US.
These are very hard problems to solve.
It's basically a website to stimulate the good feelings that come from absorbing information, which creates a sort of pathological behaviour in most of the participants.
I mean, you just wouldn't find a gathering like this in real life. Debate and discussion here happens merely for the entertainment and distraction of those using it, and the information and news presented here becomes like a fictional version of real life, except that the fictional is actually real.
While the intentions of this website might be good, I think in the long run it just further promotes the behaviour of hiding away from the world, and as a result is a net negative to those who use it.
There comes the undeniable proof that we’re back to the Stone Age!