OT: Global cooling 34 million years ago

http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5918/1187

Martin van Calmhout - a formidable Dutch science journalist - reviewed
this article in Science in yesterday's Volkskrant. One of the authors -
Henk Brinkhuis - is a professor at Utrecht.

It talks about a 5C drop in global temperature over 100,000 years some
34 million years ago during the Eocene-Oligocene Climate Transition.

The paper is based a new technique for recovering paleolthic
temperatures, by measuring the the relative concentrations of
particular organic chemicals in the cell wall of single cell fossils,
which allowed the authors to clarify what what actually going
on during the transition, when the Antartic ice-*** seems to
have made its appearance

The authors can't come up with an explanation for why it happened
as fast as it did. Explanations for the transition do exist, but they
seem to envisage a slower cooling.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7190/full/nature06853.html

No doubt the denialists will blame the sun, as usual.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen


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