History vanishes with melting Himalayan glacier
By Stephanie Pappas
updated 12/13/2011 2:14:12 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO — A half-century record of history has melted away from the Naimona'nyi glacier in southwestern Tibet, highlighting the changes coming to glaciers across the Himalayas.
Ice cores from glaciers capture a detailed history of the atmosphere and climate from the time when the snow and ice fell. They record dust, ash and even minute amounts of nuclear fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in the 1950s. It can all be seen in ice around the globe, from the Himalayas to the poles to the Alps.
But at Naimona'nyi, that evidence has all but disappeared.
"At least the top 50 years of this record has been obliterated," Mary Davis, an ice-core researcher at Ohio State University, reported here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "We surmise that perhaps it is gone because of melting."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45657315/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TufXPOZyciw
Melting...
= new reply since forum marked as read
... it can "miss" periods of sudden heat ...
As you are only identifying very small layers in a small cross-section, there isn't
the scope to recognise a minor unconformity - only the gross changes - and as
these brief heating events will coincide across corresponding sites around the
globe, it will be taken as "the recognised reference pattern" rather than the tragic
anomaly that it is.
Compare this to the (geologically) short-term damage that modern humans
have done not only to the fossil record but to the geological stratifications
over large parts of the globe: unnatural extraction & transporation of an incredibly
wide range of materials (from finely distributed minerals to gross earth-shifting
operations), scouring of large areas of land & seabed, and the addition of layers
of long-term pollution.
Future geologists will look back and deduce that the extinction event was caused
by global tsunamis triggered by the catastrophic impact of a meteorite constisting
mainly of coal mixed with radioactive plastic.