New Evidence Shows Arctic Island 6°C Warmer 9,000 Years Ago
Zhokhov Island in the Siberian High Arctic today exhibits inhospitably severe climate conditions, desolate tundra, and year-round pack ice in the surrounding sea.
During the Early Holocene, this same island was warm enough to host waterfowl species, birch trees, and year-round human residents who hunted polar bear and reindeer.
I. Zhokhov Island Today: A Frozen Wasteland
The Siberian High Arctic’s Zhokhov Island is today covered in barren tundra. There are no trees or waterfowl.
Even though today’s CO2 concentrations have eclipsed 410 ppm, Zhokhov Island’s summer temperatures may reach just 1° or 2° C above freezing during its warmest month (July).
The island is surrounded by a sea of pack ice year-round, even in summer.
II. Zhokhov Island Early Holocene: Warm, Teeming With Life
During the Early Holocene, Zhokhov Island was open-seas accessible.
It was teeming with waterfowl species that require 100+ days above freezing to breed successfully. Non-freezing days may reach only 60 per year today (Makeyev et al., 2003).
Zhokhov Island’s terrain was overlain with birch trees. The northern limit for birch is today 600 km farther south (Makeyev et al., 2003).
The island’s human inhabitants hunted polar bear and reindeer with blades made of raw materials (obsidian) gleaned from long-distance regional trading networks (Pitulko et al., 2019).
Zhokhov was at least 5 to 6°C warmer than today between 10,000 and 9000 years ago (Makeyev et al., 2003), or when CO2 concentrations hovered around 260 ppm.
III. The Early Holocene Arctic Was 4-7°C Warmer Than Today
Other recently published evidence also affirms that the climate of the Arctic was 4 to 7°C warmer than today about 9000 years ago (McFarlin et al., 2018, Mangerud and Svendsen, 2018).
Image Source: McFarlin et al., 2018
Image Source: Mangerud and Svendsen, 2018
IV. Modern Arctic Temperatures Haven’t Risen In 80 YearsIn contrast, modern Arctic temperatures are no warmer today than they were in the 1930s.
Image Source: Hanhijärvi et al., 2013
Greenland was actually much warmer during the 1920s and 1930s than in recent decades.
Image Source: Box et al., 2009
None of this climatic evidence supports the popularized contention that the Arctic climate is significantly affected by either the atmospheric CO2 concentration or the rise in human emissions.
V. New Paper: Zhokhov Residents Were Long-Distance Traders
Artifacts recovered from an archaeological site on Zhokhov Island indicate that the human populations that lived there between about 8250 and 7800 years ago hunted polar bear in the winter and reindeer year-round. They used dogsled technology and the blades they used were made of obsidian or volcanic glass.
To procure obsidian, the authors suggest that the people of Zhokhov necessarily needed to travel extensively to trade with those on the Siberian mainland. The travel distances for the Siberian trade were suggested to reach many hundreds of kilometers.
Read rest at No Tricks Zone
Trackback from your site.
jerry krause
| #
Hi Kenneth and PSI Readers,
Robert Beatty recently commented (https://principia-scientific.com/natural-philosophy-meteorology-climatology-3/) “I am pleased my innocent questions have stimulated so many new leads in your investigations. You have drawn inferences from what is a very small data set, which must be cautioned against.
However, you make interesting comment with wider implication: “Therefore, the principle of buoyancy seems to require that the less dense atmosphere spontaneously ‘bubble’ up through the cooler, denser, atmosphere above it.”
This has implication in the oceans where comparatively recent satellite vision has found hot water pooling on the surface above hot spots on the sea floor.”
I have just looked at satellite image of Zhokhov Island and was amazed, but not really, to see something which I can only infer to be three small volcanic craters with a diameters of about 1000ft in the central portion of the island.
In the 19th Century Louis Agassiz convinced the geological community that Glaciers of significant thickness had once covered northern portions of Europe, Asia, and North America because of erratic bounders found on their surfaces. And I have read that it has been concluded that the last glacier melted about 10,000 years ago.
Now it seems we have evidence of the volcanic activity that could have caused the melting of any glacier in the vicinity of Zhokhov Island. And as Robert Beatty stated: “I am pleased my innocent questions have stimulated so many new leads in your investigations.”
From which I conclude we must have more innocent conversations about ‘things’ we have read. But maybe we should not ignore this small island just because it is only one small island. For I do doubt that this one small volcano could have melted all the glaciers from the east most to the west most of North America.
And based upon the observed present volcanic activty during my lifetime, I have no trouble considering that volcanic activity might have some influence upon the earth’s past climates. I will even make the claim that volcanic activity had to have a major influence upon the earth’s past climates.
And I have observed that it takes a lot of snow to make a glacier a mile or more thick. So the only mechanism I could imagine (ponder) was the Arctic Ocean had to be a lot warmer to evaporate its water which water vapor could eventually condense and fall on the earth’s surfaces at lower (cooler) latitudes.
Have a good day, Jerry
Reply