Me: "Once upon a time..."
RX: "...when the world was shiny and new, and even the sky gleamed the color of brass..."
Me: "...and was polished every day by angels, that article about Doggerland in National Geographic would have just been about Doggerland, rather than..."
RX: "...Climate Change?"
Me: "Yeah, 'Here's what we can learn from our peaceful ancestors about dealing with climate change.'"
RX: "They dealt with it by moving to where the climate was better!"
Me: "If it hadn't been for those bastard Cro-Magnons driving around in their Cadillac Escalades, there wouldn't have been any climate change!"
RX: "Don't be silly; the Escalade is a very recent model."
Me: "Okay, Chevy Suburbans, then."
Friday, November 30, 2012
Overheard in the Hallway...
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18 comments:
I always liked the janet jackson song " i want to take you in an escalade"
Dammit, now I've got to get the coffee off the screen... :-)
so, how much was a carbon credit in antelope horn and sharpened flint?
When Nat Geo went away from black and white photos of half naked women it was the begining of the end.
Gerry
On the Other Hand, if Doggerland was still above water, Rommel would have parked his Tanks in Trafalger Square in 1940.
For a while I was marking every time I saw a climate change mention in NatGeo when I read it, with the intention of writing them all down and blogging about it. But my fingers got so tired of folding the corners of pages over, I kinda gave it up.
On the Other Hand, if Doggerland was still above water, Rommel would have parked his Tanks in Trafalger Square in 1940.
And that would have been just fine with the people who babble about climate change.
Hey, at least he was a National Socialist, like so many of them want to be...
I always wondered why I kept finding flint chips in my old diesel Suburban.
BTW, I am hereby claiming Doggerland, and appointing myself Grand Poo-Bah of Doggerlandia.
As soon as the sea levels lower during the next Ice Age, I'll be taking bids for patents of nobility there. You will have to bring your own serfs, however.
Although I'm sure we can find some refugees somewhere.
Firehand, not to get off-topic, but Rommel was about as apolicical as one can get in Nazi Germany and still retain oxygen in the lungs. He never joined the National Socialists/Nazi party, and despised what it was becoming. He was, however, a very patriotic German and an exceptional leader of men and knew how to utilize his (meager) resources (and those of his enemies, which he captured). Its like someone saying "Oh, you're an American. You must be a Democrat, then." Being one does not necessarily mean you are the other. Rommel served his country, not the man at the helm.
/rant
Now back to our regularly scheduled comments!
So where did all that Water come from, I know the area is shallow but that's a LOT of water.
Melting of some big continental glaciers? (Doggerland must have been nippy in winter) Or A huge inland sea that was higher that ocean level flushing into the world ocean.
It would be interesting to see what the rest of the word looked like: I'd imagine that off SE Asia there's be a lot more land too.
Would the Grand banks off the east coast have been out of the water?
Gulf of St. Laurence?
I'm sure the Arctic was covered with ice, but large parts must have been ice right down to what is now the ocean floor if the sea level was that low.
If Doggerland were still above water, would there be snakes in England?
The amazing thing is the same babblers about climate change can't explain how such a drastic warming occurred during the warm up after the last ice age without the infernal combustion engine making heat and allowing the masses to move about freely (Free movement being the true object of their ire, since having a truck allowed the Joads and others of that ilk to exercise initiative and get out of Dodge when the getting was good and the staying was terrible).
Anonymous at 2:38 pm, interesting and important questions, we may never know. I assume you know about the Scablands of eastern Washington State? Apparently during the ice ages there were periodic meltings and floodings of lakes formed by ice dams. I think Ballard of Titanic fame also did some exploration of the Black Sea to see if signs of human habitation could be found, and he found some farm building foundations (sorry about the alliteration.
Where did all the water come from? –
That one is easy. During the last ice age, a not-unsubstantial portion of the world’s water was frozen solid and sitting in the form of an ice cap on the northern extents of the big continents. They extended as far south as Boise Idaho in some places. This caused the sea levels to be much lower than they are today since all that water wasn’t in the sea – rather, it was sitting on dry land in solid form. During that time, areas like Doggerland would have been under the ice (in fact, being a glacial moraine, Doggerland owes its very existence to the glaciers). However, there was a period of time during the melt-off where the ice had receded enough to expose areas like Doggerland, but not so much as to have created enough water to fill the oceans back up enough to inundate it. Doggerland’s time as dry land was limited the very same day it first saw sunlight. Another very well known example of this phenomenon is the Bering Sea Land bridge between Asia and North America, which is the popular theory for how humans got to North America in the first place.
It is highly probable that the amount of time it took to melt off enough ice to inundate Doggerland would have been measured in tens of millennia, so for the lifetimes of hundreds and hundreds of generations of humans, it was not temporary dry land, but firm, permanent ground. To us, looking through the lens of history, we see Doggerland as seafloor that was temporarily exposed, but to the people then, Britain wasn’t an island.
And, in fact, the sea level rise that inundated Doggerland, which has been occurring for much of the last 15,000 years, continues to this day, and is figured to continue continuing until the next ice age sets in (and we are due for one any day now) . Hence my reaction when arrogant humans claim responsibility for it and call it their own. King Canute would have laughed at that, I’m sure.
It would be interesting to see what the rest of the word looked like: I'd imagine that off SE Asia there's be a lot more land too.
There was.
Would the Grand banks off the east coast have been out of the water?
Some of it, yes.
Gulf of St. Laurence?
Some of it, yes, although it would have been under ice for most of the time that it would have been high and dry, since that area only very recently came out from under the caps. Very near the Gulf of St. Lawrence is the last great remnant of the continental ice caps in the form of Greenland.
http://earth.rice.edu/mtpe/cryo/cryosphere/topics/ice_age.mov
This little animation is a great way to get a better look at the questions asked earlier about the great banks, the St. Lawrence area, and southeast asia.
YOu can see that Australia and Indonesia used to be one landmass, and that southeast asia, instead of being the wispy penninsula and archipelagos that it is now was a solid subcontinental landmass.
The bering sea landbridge is also very clear, as is the lack of separation between britain and the rest of Europe.
The grand banks were mostly dry at the beginning of the animation, and as I said before, the St. lawrence area remains covered by ice until almost last of all, so it's hard to tell what's going on there.
Windy
"If Doggerland were still above water, would there be snakes in England? "
There are - adders and the subspecies known as 'politicians' (I'd include slow-worms and bureaucrats but apparently they aren't 'true snakes', just 'snake wannabees').
Goober
Aren't you also forgetting the 'tilt' caused by all that ice? Evidence shows that Northern Scotland is still rising at a noticeable rate in 'rebound' with the removal of all that weight of ice. Consequently Southern areas are 'sinking' just a tad. So the depths involved are not exactly accurate indicators of what they were (I live in hop of one day seeing Westminster sink under the waves).
Just sayin'
The raves on Doggerland while they were dancing it out of the ice were FANTASTIC! Unfortunately, they overdanced and ran it into the ocean.
Yes. you heard it here first: Raves create Climate Change.
Pedantic Rant Alert:
In 1940 Romel wouldn't have had Tigers. PzKpfw MkIIIs or IVs (and short barrel IVs at that). And yes, I still play PanzerBliz.
National Geographic Society has drunk deeply from the AGW gourd. And their editorial board is intellectually sloppy in other areas. Their last map of the USA resulted in an apology and corrections for 17(!) errors ... in their own county's map!!
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