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Canada Comet Lengthened the Ice Age
Iddo Genuth writes "Recent geological evidence gathered in Ohio and Indiana has been verified by a University of Cincinnati assistant professor as support of a comet theory, claiming a comet explosion over earth was the cause of drastic changes to life on our planet. This evidence strengthens initial data collected over a year ago. The explosion, which occurred over what is now Canada, caused the extinction of animals and cultures and lengthened the Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago that should have been coming to an end."
http://slashdot.org/tags/blamecanada
"the" ice age?
Not totally to blame, partial public nudity (toplessness) is legal in Ontario. (Ontario, the largest province in Canada, home of Toronto)
No; read the whole clause:
[something] lengthened the Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago that should have been coming to an end.
The phrase "the ice age" is qualified; it's only talking about the ice age that [did something or other], which it specifies in the final clause. The misplaced adjective phrase does break standard English syntax (which is often order-sensitive), but not enough to change its meaning to a description of "the one and only" ice age. Of course, capitalizing "Ice Age" as if it were a proper noun does imply that the author was thinking this, even if he didn't manage to screw up the sentence badly enough to say actually say it.
Obeying proper syntax, the phrase should either have been this:
[something] lengthened the [i]ce [a]ge that should have been coming to an end nearly 13,000 years ago.
Or this, moving the temporal description into the previous clause so it describes the time of the event (like the phrase "over what is now Canada" describes the place of the event) and not the time of the end of the ice age in question (and of course getting out of the way of that qualification of which ice age we mean):
The explosion, which occurred nearly 13,000 years ago over what is now Canada, caused the extinction of animals and cultures and lengthened the [i]ce [a]ge that should have been coming to an end.
Yes.