Ancient Artifacts Prove Glaciers Wax And Wane Naturally
We constantly hear panic stories about melting glaciers, accompanied by hysterical voices calling out that retreating glaciers are a clear sign of human-induced global warming
Much of this hysteria is driven by green activists and politicians who know just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be sensible.
Scientifically, you can’t reach a conclusion based on a principle. You have to look at the real science and carry out accurate measurements.
This is a complex subject, but let us have a quick look at the issue. What about atmospheric warming? Well, for starters, we need some physics.
For a gram of cold glacial ice to warm up by 1°C, say from -4°C to -3°C, it takes about two Joules of heat. It needs this amount of heat for each degree Celsius that the ice warms.
Inside a glacier, it can be as cold as -50°C, but let us consider the top part and, being generous, call it -10°C. In other words, to raise the temperature of a gram of ice from -10°C to 0°C, we will need about 20 Joules.
So far, so good. So where would this heat come from? Well, the global warming enthusiasts say, ‘from the atmosphere.’ So, we take 20 Joules from the atmosphere.
That sounds reasonable, but now for a bit more physics.
When you melt ice into water, it needs a huge amount of heat to separate the frozen molecules. In fact, it takes just over 300 Joules per gram.
Remember that it takes 20 Joules to raise the temperature of a gram of ice by 10°C, but 300 Joules to turn that one gram of ice into water. So where do the 300 Joules of heat come from?
‘Well, the atmosphere,’ say the warmists. If that much heat is being pulled out of the atmosphere, why do we not see the air above a glacier cooling?
After all, the warmists are worrying about the atmosphere warming by only 1 or 2°C.
So if an entire glacier is melting faster than before, where on earth (excuse the pun) is all that melting heat coming from? Remember, millions of grams of ice each need 300 Joules to melt. That is a vast amount of energy.
What about an alternative mechanism? There is another option, i.e., direct sunlight falling on the glacier surface.
What is known to happen is that sunlight warms the top couple of millimeters of the ice, which melts quite easily. So an obvious question is: Where does that water go?
The simple answer is that it percolates downward through the fissures in the glacier. The water works its way to the bottom, where the ice lies on the bedrock. There, it acts as a lubricant, reducing the friction between the ice and the rock, so the ice slides faster.
Therefore, the entire glacier becomes more mobile, allowing larger chunks to break off the glacier’s end.
The amount of sunlight falling on the glacier’s surface has nothing to do with the temperature of the atmosphere.
In contrast, it has to do with the amount of cloud cover, which in turn is linked to the amount of cosmic radiation coming in from outer space. That, in turn, is linked to the Sun’s magnetic activity, as the Sun influences the magnetic barrier protecting the Earth.
Where this magnetic barrier ‘leaks’ is visible at the North and South poles, where one can see the spectacular Aurorae that form curtains of waving light sheets in the night sky.
So we clearly have a perfectly reasonable mechanism for retreating glaciers, which has nothing to do with atmospheric warming.
But there is yet more! There has been a significant archaeological benefit from the retreat of some glaciers and melting ice sheets.
What has happened is that melting ice has revealed thousands of ancient artifacts, a bonanza for historians and archaeologists.
For example, 10,000-year-old Atlatl spear-throwing hunting darts have been found in the Rocky Mountains and the Canadian Yukon.
Oetzi The Iceman was found during a period of glacial melt in a high mountain pass on the Italian – Austrian border in 1991. He was subsequently dated to 3300BC, which meant the pass was at least as clear as it is now 5300 years ago.
Intact arrows have been found in a Norwegian mountain pass dating to 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. They have quartzite arrowheads secured by animal sinew and Birch-bark glue.
A 1,700-year-old Roman-style shoe was also found in Norway. In the Schnidejoch pass in the Swiss Alps, leather trousers, shoes, and birch-bark arrows were found, dating back to 3,000 to 4,000 BCE.
The list goes on, [but it shows that there was no thick ice cover there in the past, such as 1,700, 3,000, 5300 and 10,000 years ago].
This indicates that ice cover and glaciers have come and gone regularly in the past, which had nothing to do with industrially produced carbon dioxide. They are the result of changes in Sun’s magnetic activity.
CCD editor’s note: The geothermal and volcanic activity that bottom-melts glaciers from below — well documented in West Antarctica and elsewhere — is another natural mechanism the atmosphere-first narrative conveniently ignores.
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