Great Plains or Great Desert? The Sea of Dunes Lies in Wait
By WILLIAM K. STEVENS
Published: May 28, 1996

AS devastating as the present drought in the southern Great Plains has been, scientists who study ancient climates are finding that droughts, floods and severe cold far surpassing anything in the modern era have punctuated the 10,000 years since the last ice age.

The discovery has surprised experts because the climate of this most recent period in earth history, called the Holocene, has long been considered relatively stable and serene, and its comparative tranquillity has long been thought essential to the development of civilization.

Now, paleoclimatologists are finding in case after case that the Holocene climate has been more volatile than had been believed. The disturbing implication is that these natural catastrophes could come again at any time, quite apart from any change in climate that might result from emissions of waste industrial gases that can trap heat.

“We like to think of whatever climate we’re in as normal,” said Dr. Daniel Muhs, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey in Denver, “and our natural assumption is that it will keep on that way — that’s a very tenuous assumption.”

It turns out that the climate of the last century and a half, the brief period in which people have been measuring temperature and precipitation, has indeed been relatively placid. These comparatively calm recent decades have nevertheless had their own ups and downs, like the drought that struck the southern Great Plains in the 1930’s, creating the Dust Bowl.

Great Plains or Great Desert? The Sea of Dunes Lies in Wait – NYTimes.com