Re: Pole Shifts - Should We Care?

In Article <NbWc7.19$k7.326@reggie.win.bright.net> Thomas McDonald wrote:
> In Article <3B73F43D.7DF66774@zetatalk.com> Nancy Lieder wrote:
>> 2. the mammoths were eating vegetation that formerly grew
>>    in the area, please deal with why this vegetation is not
>>    found there TODAY
>
> At the end of the last ice age, as part of the great
> geological and climatological changes that took place with
> the melting of the continental ice sheets, the great
> ecosystem termed the "Mammoth steppe" changed as well.

Interesting that about 11,000 Siberia was WARM AND LUSH yet that was
when the last ICE AGE had its grip on Europe/Greenland. Per Discovery
Magazine (below) "The heyday of the woolly mammoth was the Pleistocene
Epoch, stretching from 1.8 million years ago to the end of the last ice
age 11,000 years ago." Take the globe in your hands, put
Greenland/Europe at the North Pole, and you see a very different
Siberia!  As in warm and lush.  Now how could these same temperate
regions, both supposedly at the same latitude have such radically
different climates?  Simple.

   1. Ice Ages are caused by crust shifts, where a portion
      of the crust is moved to the North Pole
   2. Siberia was positioned in a more southerly region
      pole shifts back

Climate Can Change Quickly
Associated Press, Oct 28, 1999
    In a study that may sound a warning about global warming,
    researchers have found evidence that the world's climate can
    change suddenly, almost like a thermostat that clicks from
    cold to hot. A new technique for analyzing gases trapped in
    Greenland glaciers shows that an ice age that gripped the
    Earth for thousands of years ended abruptly some 15,000
    years ago when the average air temperatures soared. "There
    was a 16-degree abrupt warming at the end of the last ice age,"
    said Jeffrey P. Severinghaus of the Scripps Institution of
    Oceanography, lead author of a study to be published Friday
    in the journal Science. "It happened within just a couple of
    decades. The old idea was that the temperature would change
    over a thousand years. But we found it was much faster.'"

On the Possibility of Very Rapid Shift of the Poles
Excerpts from article by Flavio Barbiero

    In his book The Path of the Pole (Chilton Book, Philadelphia,
    1970) Charles Hapgood expresses the hypothesis that the poles
    have changed their position three times during the recent past.
    From the Greenland Sea, where it shifted about seventy thousand
    years ago, the north pole moved to Hudson Bay fifty thousand
    years ago, and finally to its presents position 1,600 years ago, at
    the end of Pleistocene. To support his hypothesis, Hapgood
    presents an impressive quantity of evidence which can be
    summarized as follows:

    1  The presence of ice caps in North America and Northern Europe,
       highly eccentrical compared to the present north pole.
    2. The contemporaneous absence of ice caps from Siberia which
       was actually populated to its northernmost regions by an
       impressive zoological community.
    3. The arctic Sea was warmer than it is today, and there were
       human beings living in the New Siberia Islands.
    4. Antarctica was partially free of ice.
    5. The general climatic situation of the Earth was coherent with
       a different position of the poles.

Discovery Magazine
April 1999

    The heyday of the woolly mammoth was the Pleistocene
    Epoch, stretching from 1.8 million years ago to the end
    of the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Mammoths thrived
    particularly well in Siberia, where dry grasslands once
    stretched for hundreds of miles, supporting a vibrant
    ecosystem of mammoths, bison, and other jumbo
    herbivores. .. The mammoth fossils on Wrangel Island
    are the youngest that have ever been found. It was there,
    apparently, that mammoths made their last stand. They
    died out only 3,800 years ago.

Discover Magazine - March 1998
Empires in the Dust, by Karen Wright

    I've got some figures I can show you. figures always help," says
    paleoclimatologist Peter de Menocal, swiveling his chair from
    reporter to computer in his office at Columbia University's
    Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, just north of New York
    City. On the monitor, de Menocal pulls up a graph derived
    from the research project known as GISP2 (for Greenland Ice
    Sheet Project 2). ...  By tracking oxygen-isotope ratios within
    the ice cores, the GISP2 graph reflects temperatures over
    Greenland for the past 15,000 years. Near the bottom of the
    graph, a black line squiggle wildly until 11,700 years ago,
    when the last ice age ended and the current warm era, the
    Holocene, began. The line then climbs steadily for a few thousand
    years, wavering only modestly, until 7,000 years before the
    present. From then until now, global temperatures appear
    relatively stable - "then until now" comprising, of course, the
    entire span of human civilization. ...