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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1002616)	2/27/2017 10:59:45 AM
From: James Seagrove	2 Recommendations Recommended By FJB Mick Mørmøny Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575758

"Unusual would be something like the Arctic with less than 1M sq km of ice at the end of the melt season." There have been long periods of time on earth where that was not the case... "Flowering plants and hippo-like creatures once thrived in the Arctic, where the tundra and polar bears now prevail." Migration, past and future The year-round residence of mammals such as Coryphodon was a "behavioral prerequisite" for their eventual dispersal across high-latitude land bridges that geologists believe linked Asia and Europe with North America, Eberle said. "In order for mammals to have covered the great distances across land bridges that once connected the continents, they would have required the ability to inhabit the High Arctic year-round in proximity to these land bridges," Eberle said. The fossils also suggest that creatures such as tapirs originated in the Arctic, as that is where the earliest known fossils of these groups are found, and later migrated southward. "Until geologically older fossils of tapirs and brontotheres are found elsewhere in the world, the Arctic is very much in the running as a place of origin," Eberle said. The animals likely made their way south from the Arctic in minute increments over millions of years as the climate shifted and cooled, the researchers suggest. "This study may provide the behavioral smoking gun for how modern groups of mammals like ungulates — ancestors of today's horses and cattle — and true primates arrived in North America," Eberle said. The new study, funded by the National Science Foundation, also foreshadows the impacts of continuing global warming on Arctic plants and animals, Eberle said. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as those at mid-latitudes with global warming. Air temperatures over Greenland have risen by more than 7 degrees F since 1991, according to climate scientists. "We are hypothesizing that lower-latitude mammals will migrate north as the temperatures warm in the coming centuries and millennia," Eberle said. "If temperatures ever warm enough in the future to rival the Eocene, there is the possibility of new intercontinental migrations by mammals." "Let's face it — when the climate changes, an organism has three choices — adapt, move/disperse, or go extinct," she added. livescience.com