What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze?

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events."

Comments

Re:Climate change is for pussies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tundra soil is not particularly fertile and the processes that enrich soil can take hundreds if not thousands of years. I suppose if you have enough compost to cover Canada and such.

and that ignores the obvious desertification that would happen across huge swathes of currently productive land.

Waste of time

[scribble73]

This headline promises a lot, but delivers nothing. The article just looks briefly at the controversy -- in other words, we still don't know.

This comes from a good Journal, but reading it was a waste of time.

Not really much here

[x181]

Old Argument (Younger Dryas): We found iridium (rare on earth but abundant in meteorites), nanodiamonds and magnetic particles covering ancient tools and mammoth remains at sites which we believe are around 12,000 years old. Therefore, we believe a cosmic collision caused the 1,300 year deep-freeze.

New Argument: We performed radiocarbon dating on tools found at the 29 sites described in the Old Argument and found that only 3 of the 29 sites were around 12,000 years old. The tools at other sites were much older or younger. Therefore, the deep-freeze was probably not caused by a cosmic collision.

Re: Climate change is for pussies.

[bunratty]

There's so much misinformation in your post it hurts. It's warmed 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past 134 years. It is currently warmer now than any time in the past 2000 years. In the past 17 years Earth has warmed by about 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade. And there's no sign of cooling or even temperatures leveling off.