The weather report for California 8,200 years ago was exceptionally wet and stormy.
That is the conclusion of a paleoclimate study that analyzed stalagmite records from White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains published online Jun. 20 in Nature Scientific Reports.
The weather report for California 8,200 years ago was exceptionally wet and stormy.
That is the conclusion of a paleoclimate study that analyzed stalagmite records from White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains published online Jun. 20 in Nature Scientific Reports.
The Golden State’s 150-year stretch of unusually wet weather appears to have been marked by particularly intense winter storms and coincides with a climate anomaly in Greenland ice cores first detected in 1997. Before this “8.2 ka event” was discovered, scientists thought the world’s climate had been unusually stable during the Holocene, the geological epoch that covers the last 11,700 years of Earth’s history.
Since then researchers have associated the distinctive, 3.3-degree Celsius temperature dip in the Greenland ice cores with a catastrophic event: The drainage of two giant glacial lakes (Lake Ojibway and Lake Agassiz) located in northeastern North America caused by the collapse of massive ice sheet that covered much of the continent during the last ice age. In short order, the two lakes dumped enough melt water into the North Atlantic to disrupt the world’s oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns and raise the sea level by somewhere between two to 10 feet. The tremendous freshwater flood has been associated with an extended cold snap in Europe, increased drought in Africa, weakened monsoons in Asia and strengthened monsoons in South America.
Read more at Vanderbilt University
Image: This image shows a dated quarter section of the White Moon Cave stalagmite that spans the period of the Holocene anomaly. (Credit: Jessica Oster, Vanderbilt University)
