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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (16081)	3/28/2007 6:18:12 PM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218428

Snowshoe, We ARE in an ice age right now but at the present moment we are enjoying an interglacial warm period that began just a bare moment ago in geologic time, when the Wisconsin/Wrum glaciation melted. The melting itself was a process and didn't happen all at once, but the geologic record shows that by 8,000 BC, the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, that the glaciers had largely retreated. 10,000 years ago is accepted as the end of the Wisconsin Glaciation and that, geologically speaking, is the blink of an eye ago. Probably the maximum overburden of glacial ice was reached late in the Wisconsin, probably around 20,000 years ago. How long before the ice comes back? The Late Pleistocene began approximately 130,000 years ago with a warm period called the Sangamon Interglacial and the Sangamon lasted till about 115,000 years ago when cooling began with the beginning of the Wisconsin Glaciation. The Wisconsin likely started very slowly, taking many tens of thousands of years to get underway, and with short term warm and cold periods. The Pamlico Formation beaches and shoreline I mention in an earlier post were formed during the Sangamon Interglacial. So, with past as prologue, using the most recent glaciation, the Wisconsin, as the pattern, maybe we have another 5,000 years to go before the ice comes back with a vengence. Viewed this way, this is pretty simple stuff. The earth has been in an ice age for a million years or so and there have been repeated glaciations about every 100,000 years seperated by interglacial warm periods. Estimates range from eight glaciations to fifteen glaciations. In other words, in the last million years or so there have been roughly a dozen episodes like the recent Wisconsin Glaciation. The reason it is difficult to get a precise handle on the exact age and extent of earlier glaciations is that all this moving ice tends to scour away the evidence of earlier episodes. But there is still evidence, serial moraines and the fossil record. This ice age probably began when the poles began to acquire a permanent ice cap and that would be barely a million years for the north pole and 40 million years for the south pole. Before that, going back to the previous ice age of 250 million years ago the poles had been ice free and had been ice free for most of earths geologic history, except for ice ages. It is probably not normal or healthy to have ice at the poles. So, if we use the Sangamon Interglacial of 125,000 years ago as a guide, the earth probably has a good bit more warming to go this cycle. That means that the oceans SHOULD rise another 25 feet and submerge coastal regions everywhere. That is, unless it is different this time. My bet is that we are, just like Maurice has elaborated upon at length, in danger of being on a one way trip to becoming a frozen ice ball because of all the environmental carbon that has been tied up in carbonaceous rocks. Apparently the earth nearly froze completely pole to pole, destroying all life, back before the beginning of the Cambrian Period and then thawed somehow, possibly leading to the "Cambrian Explosion" that began about 550 million years ago. Could that happen again? Slagle BTW, I don't mean to say that the dozen or so glaciations, and by that I mean the glaciations that have occured in THIS CURRENT ice age, before the Wisconsin, were all the same in nature. They were not of course, some were deeper than others and some may have been deeper that the Wisconsin. They left their end moraines in different places and these formations are different in size and composition. It is an extremely complicated picture.