Earth Changes
Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade - but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.
In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Geological sciences professor William Patterson, who led the research, said: 'It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time. It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.'
The subsequent mini Ice Age lasted for 1,300 years and was probably caused by the sudden emptying of Lake Agassiz in Canada, which burst its banks and poured freezing freshwater into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
That would have disrupted the Gulf Stream - the flows of which depend on variations in saline levels and temperature - and allowed the ice to take hold.
Some scientists believe that if the Greenland ice cap melts it could disrupt the world's ocean currents and have a similarly dramatic effect.
Professor Patterson's findings emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of climate changes ever attempted and reinforce the theory that the earth's climate is unstable and can switch between warm and cold incredibly quickly.
His conclusions, published in New Scientist, are based on a study of mud deposits extracted from a lake in Western Ireland, Lough Monreagh - a region he describes as having the 'best mud in the world in scientific terms'.
Professor Patterson used a precision robotic scalpel to scrape off layers of mud just 0.5mm thick. Each layer represented three months of sediment deposition, so variations between them could be used to measure changes in temperature over very short periods.
Reader Comments
Those mastodons which were flash frozen with semi-tropical flowering plants in their mouths, standing erect, and then eaten as a delicacy in the last century after being carved from the Siberian permafrost, would indicate that the event was almost instantaneous.
This is serious stuff people!
My own crazy theory of the Younger Dryas impact event involves two dense clusters of comet fragments and two impact zones. One hit the Laurentide Ice Sheat. And the other hit North Central Mexico.
In the world according to me, each cluster's fragments fell within about twenty seconds. And the two clusters hit within an hour of each other.
So the way I see it the 1.300 year long impact winter that was the Younger Dryas Cooling was triggered by two super clusters of mostly airbursting comet fragments. And it all fell in a matter of minutes, not months. [Link]
That the Younger Dryas period was only a dip backwards into a former Ice Age which lasted more or less 100,000 years.
just a speculation,i think that the next winter will bring big surprises to many,i mean maybe the next ice age will be the next winter,signs will tell.