Record breaking DNA shows Mastodons roaming a hot North Greenland 2 million years ago

By Jo Nova

Greenland, ancient DNA, mastodon. Map.

Kap København is almost the closest point there is to the North Pole on dry land.

The survival of some DNA for two million years is astounding all of itself — breaking the record for oldest known DNA by nearly a million years. Before this, the oldest DNA was thought to be 1.2 million years — beyond which all the global DNA of all the species that ever lived was assumed to be dissolved into unreadable mush.

But now we have found enough of the ancient code to identify a whole ecosystem on the northern edge of Greenland that no one expected to find.  Apparently giant elephant-like Mastodons were wandering the far northern parts of Greenland — practically as close as they could get to the North pole without swimming.

At the time, the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.

Strangely life on Earth wasn’t suffering the sixth mass extinction.

Discovery of world’s oldest DNA breaks record by one million years

ScienceDaily

The incomplete samples, a few millionths of a millimetre long, were taken from the København Formation, a sediment deposit almost 100 metres thick tucked in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point. The climate in Greenland at the time varied between Arctic and temperate and was between 10-17C warmer than Greenland is today. The sediment built up metre by metre in a shallow bay.

Scientists discovered evidence of animals, plants and microorganisms including reindeer, hares, lemmings, birch and poplar trees. Researchers even found that Mastodon, an Ice Age mammal, roamed as far as Greenland before later becoming extinct. Previously it was thought the range of the elephant-like animals did not extend as far as Greenland from its known origins of North and Central America.

Greenland two million years ago?

Mastodon, American, painting from 1897.

The American Mastodon by Charles R Knight (1897)

As exciting as this is, it’s awkward for the catastrophic narrative, since there was no catastrophe, so it was time to accidentally say what everyone was thinking and hose it down with the usual meaningless caveats:

“One of the key factors here is to what degree species will be able to adapt to the change in conditions arising from a significant increase in temperature. The data suggests that more species can evolve and adapt to wildly varying temperatures than previously thought. But, crucially, these results show they need time to do this. The speed of today’s global warming means organisms and species do not have that time so the climate emergency remains a huge threat to biodiversity and the world — extinction is on the horizon for some species including plants and trees.”

How exactly do these results show species “need time” to adapt to a warming of 0.13 degrees C per decade which is what we have today? It’s not like anyone anywhere, apart from God, has the full weather history of Greenland circa two million BC. There just isn’t the resolution to know how much things changed from the year two million and twenty to the year two million and ten. The climate could have been changing ten times faster than today and how would we know? All the spikes blend to nothing when the graph resolution has one dot every thousand years.

It’s not that we know the climate was changing rapidly then, but we know they don’t know. And yet they doth protest…

Information bonanza coming

If we can still find ancient DNA in clay and quartz it opens whole new fields of research in biology, evolution, and paleoclimate studies. The DNA won’t just point at animals and plants but fungus and bacteria too. It will produce a trove of climate markers and whole new temperature proxies which might offer different localized climate histories and free us from the Pleistocene Cult of Ice Cores:

Professor Willerslev explained: “DNA generally survives best in cold, dry conditions such as those that prevailed during most of the period since the material was deposited at Kap København. Now that we have successfully extracted ancient DNA from clay and quartz, it may be possible that clay may have preserved ancient DNA in warm, humid environments in sites found in Africa.

If that’s true, they’ll have to stop looking. They’ll be in danger of discovering the climate keeps changing and life keeps adapting in every corner of a hotter and colder Earth.

REFERENCE

Kjær, K.H., Winther Pedersen, M., De Sanctis, B. et al. A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNANature 612, 283–291 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05453-y

9.7 out of 10 based on 77 ratings

69 comments to Record breaking DNA shows Mastodons roaming a hot North Greenland 2 million years ago

  • #
    Peter C

    A nice piece of work.
    Thanks Jo.

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    red edwards

    I wonder if anybody has tried to recover DNA from soft bodied fossils in the Burgess Shale?

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  • #

    Jo,
    Greenland was probably not at that position then. If you look at the position of Greenland for when the super continent called Columbia/Nuna existed about 2 million years ago, it lay around 28 degrees north of the equator not up near the pole.

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    • #
      Graeme No.3

      R.K.
      Columbia/Nuna existed about 2,000 million years ago. There weren’t any mastodons then.

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      RickWill

      There has been no notable land movements in the last 2 million years. A relatively short time before that, the Panama Isthmus formed and that put the North Atlantic into almost a closed loop. Just a bit of bleed through the Arctic Ocean back into the Pacific and from Pacific to Atlantic.

      It could very well have been the warming due to the enhanced Gulf Stream that cleared the ice initially. There would have been rapid deglaciation that shut down the water cycle and enabled Greenland to de-ice. Obviously it was not a permanent state because it now has permanent ice. The high resolution sea level reconstructions do not go back beyond 800kyr. So hard to piece the puzzle.

      Greenland is currently gaining elevation of 17mm per year as the NH snowfall ramps up ahead of the termination of the modern interglacial. Greenland has been gaining permanent ice extent for as long as records have been made. Probably since the Vikings left.

      Depite all this, we know that the climate was in equilibrium in 1850 because the models tell us thus and CO2 was static for a few thousands years before that so there could not be warming!

      Maybe the Mastodons stopped farting and that reduced the more powerful greenhouse gas so the ice started to form.

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  • #

    A geological/ocean current perspective from the work of Javier Vinos:

    The Bering Strait began its existence about 5.3 Ma, while the Panama Gateway completed closure around 3 Ma.

    The Arctic ice cap only started developing after the Panama Gateway closed and global ocean currents re-adjusted to the change.

    There just isn’t the resolution to know how much things changed from the year two million and twenty to the year two million and ten.

    It was cooling in response to the major geographical ocean current changes leading to our current climate position.

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    • #
      David Maddison

      Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, mammoths and mastadons are not that closely related.

      Difference between mammoths and mastadons:

      https://www.nps.gov/articles/mammoth-or-mastodon.htm

      Despite the superficial resemblance, mastodons were distinct from mammoths. Mastodon were shorter and stockier than mammoths with shorter, straighter tusks. Mastodons were wood browsers and their molars have pointed cones specially adapted for eating woody browse. Mammoths were grazers, their molars have flat surfaces for eating grass.

      https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/mammoth-or-mastodon

      While mastodons look a lot like modern elephants, they are not closely related. The ancestors of modern elephants and mammoths went their separate ways about 5 million years ago, and mastodons branched off even earlier, about 25 million years ago.

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      • #
        David Maddison

        That was meant to be a new comment, not a reply to Rowjay. I should have refreshed the oage before posting.

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      • #
        Lawrie

        I think it tells us that nothing stays the same for ever as some would assume today. The problem of the new syllabus in ignoring the past creates a here and now with no base line. My wife has Alzheimer’s and live in the moment. She has no past and cannot conceive of a future. Likewise modern uneducated youth have no past and see no future merely the moment. Millennials and younger are no more than early onset Alzheimer’s sufferers which makes conditioning them to believe anything so much easier.

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        • #
          RickWill

          I think it tells us that nothing stays the same for ever as some would assume today.

          If you believe this, you would believe the Earth was flat. Everyone should know the world was in climate equilibrium in 1850. The climate models inform of this fact. Only CO2 can alter climate.

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          • #
            Peter C

            Red thumbers are missing the irony.

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            • #

              Maybe. While i agree with Lawrie, Rick Will, Bruce and You Peter C there could be many takes on this that would generate a red thumb. It is nice to see you embarrass them all. I gave green thumbs but can see some who think the climate has never changed in the past or present would give it a red thumb because they think either it is all data manipulation or it is all weather modification. Then some of the red thumbs would be warmists who are simply offended by reality. Some also could be the English and logic police because as well as leaving off the Sarc tag, Will could have written, If you Don’t believe this instead of “If you believe this”.

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  • #
    PJB

    It varied from temperate to arctic!?! 10 to 17 deg. C warmer? Just like it was located somewhere in the southern US (or some such)?
    Certainly plate tectonics doesn’t explain that nor does the warmer global climate at that time. So what does? That the crust slid on the mantle and moved an entire continent regularly (it VARIED so therefore it went back and forth)?
    If so, what was the cycle length and how far away are we from the next “movement”?
    Man-made global warming? We have greater problems than 2 deg. C…

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    • #
      RickWill

      Once the 2000m thick ice block melts the summer temperature can rise significantly.

      If you wind the clock back 2,233,000 years ago, the North Pole was getting June average sunlight of 595W/m^2. At present, the June average is 502W/m^2. South Pole currently gets the highest daily solar input on Earth in with December average of 526W/m^2.

      Snow is interesting because the melt threshold is around 770W/m^2. So it will only melt through the middle of the day anywhere on Earth unless there is a good breeze from a warm location. At present there is only enough summer sunlight to melt more snow south of about 65N. That is why both Greenland and Iceland are accumulating ice.

      Back about 2,233,000 there would have been enough sunlight to melt snow at the North Pole. The Arctic Ocean would be ice free by August.

      The same peak intensity at the North Pole has occurred since than so I think the Panama Isthmus forming was the big factor in Greenland losing its ice but it was temporary. Due to Gulf Stream bringing warm water north causing glacier calving to accelerate by shutting down the water cycle as the adjacent water cooled. De-glaciation is a tipping point. Once water level starts rising, there is a lot more ice in contact with ocean on the fringes of the land and that shuts down the water cycle so snow fall reduces.

      We are currently witnessing the termination of the modern interglacial.

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  • #
    Orson

    The best science journalism gets us to absorb new data, first. But then goes a step further, getting us to re-think old premises and reconsider implications of the new paths opening. This is exciting news. Thank you for presenting this, Jo.

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  • #
    sophocles

    I know one “species” which needs the temperature of those past days thrust down its throat and its mouth sewn shut: the UN.

    Plamet Earth is obviously (to anyone who can think) still in a cold period; there is still year-round ice and snow at the poles.

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  • #
    Lawrie

    There is a Netflix series about an apocalyptic event at the end of the last ice age which may have caused the rapid cooling of the Younger Dryas period. Ancient structures in many places around the world dating to about 12800 years before present led the narrator to the conclusion that mankind had developed very well but then was virtually destroyed in a cataclysmic event, possibly a collision with the asteroid belt when earth was impacted by multiple large asteroids. Earth apparently passes through this region every so often. Impacts caused rapid melting of vast sections of ice leading to massive flooding. Maybe the Noah flood did happen and happened in many parts of the world.

    It puts capping the price of coal and gas into some perspective. If I were a coal company and I had the choice of supplying a generator in NSW with coal at $125 or could sell it on the overseas market for $300 I would be tempted to the latter and so would my shareholders. When Bowen thinks wind, solar and BATTERIES will be cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear we know our civilization has not much longer to live.

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    • #
      David Maddison

      Graham Hancock has been promoting the hypothesis of an advanced Ice Age civilisation for some time now and has some excellent videos on YouTube. We are not talking about discredited theories about “aliens” or modern technology like we have now but more like advanced technology for the time such as pre-Dynastic structures in Egypt falsely attributed to “ancient Egyptians”.

      Much evidence of Ice Age civilisation would have been destroyed or more hopefully still exists but is buried over 100m below the ocean. That’s because people tend to live by the sea and the oceans rose 100m or so after the last Ice Age glacial maximum. 100m is not a convenient depth for normal SCUBA diving operations and needs advanced, difficult and expensive techniques.

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      • #

        The way megalite culture, buildings and pyramids followed a path from west to east in Europe. And of course south to nortrh America, several authors wrote about in different angels of view.

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      • #

        To discuss is also the age of all these buildings in Egypt and it’s not so near surroundings, or in Middle and South America etc.
        Ayers Rock and the Sphinx have in common, they sufferd of at lot of rain when looking at the erosion traces of both.
        So the Sphinx can’t have be built 2400 BC, but as not only Hancock wrote that around 10,000 BC is much more likely.

        BTW, Egyptologist are to compare with Climate “Scientists” in questions of scientific behaviour.
        A small possible room found by Gantenbrink behind an estimated door by the robo-cam Upuaut was declared by Egyptologist Stadelman as a figned room, because in the Cheops Pyramid can’t be no more rooms…

        Zahi A. Hawass is a very suspect administrator of Egyptian Antiquities btw.

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      Ross

      I watched that same series and it reminded me a lot of the “Chariots of the Gods” documentary from the 1970’s. That older series postulating that the earth had been visited by aliens who had superior tech skills to ours. That those same aliens then influenced the building of structures like the Great Pyramids of Egypt. It was in the era of UFO’s, flying saucers and ET, so it it was very current at the time. The myths and legends about the “great flood” would appear to be present in some many different cultures, according to Graham Hancock. (presenter of that Netflix series) What he postulates that caused that huge flood is very feasible. Still to this day, no one can explain how the Egyptians transported and installed 70 tonne granite blocks hundreds of kms into the pyramids.

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      • #

        No one has an idea, how the Egyptians were able to core drilling or how they executed their more tha exact stonework.

        no one can explain how the Egyptians transported and installed 70 tonne granite blocks hundreds of kms into
        the pyramids.

        That were the lighter ones 😀

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  • #
    David Maddison

    Further comments after Lawrie above, I think the Left see the physical world as static and unchanging, much as the world was seen before the discovery of geological processes such as erosion, sedimentation, uplift, etc.; plate tectonics; the Milankovich cycles; solar cycles and genuine, natural, changes in the climate. (I won’t say genuine “climate change” because that is a marketing term.)

    Something also rarely or never raised in discussions of the global warming fraud is the fact that the sun is a variable star.

    The view that we live in an unchanging world is really quite primitive and reflects the poor level of education and general knowledge of those members of the slave army of useful of the Elites who promote the anthropogenic global warming fraud.

    This stuff used to be taught in primary school, back in the day. I learned it in 5th and 6th grade and I knew about it in my reading before that. We learned about Ice Ages and their cause, extinct animals etc.. Now you just learn about the alphabet people and the supposed multitude of genders and hatred of Western Civilisation in general.

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    • #
      Graeme No.3

      David
      Don Easterbrook did an excellent explanation of the various effects on climate by a small decrease in solar activity.
      There was a short youtube entitled Cause of the little ice age and climate change by Don J. Easterbrook, hosted by someone with a dreadful taste in neckties, but it doesn’t show up now on my browser ( time to change from DDG) which takes less than 14 minutes with lots of graphs.
      If you can track it down it might be easier than the (very) lengthy ones.
      Otherwise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krrimqxDBMI

      That was for a small variation in solar output (0.15%). There was a graph from New Scientist!! showing big ice ages every (roughly) 140 million years since The Cambrian. Now also hard to find http://i1.wp.com/omniclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/28392301.jpg
      This might be due to galactic dust clouds or possibly Willie Soon et al. pointing out that Main Stream stars (our sun) can vary in output by up to 4%.

      http://i1.wp.com/omniclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/28392301.jpg

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      • #
        Graeme No.3

        Sorry, interrupted by mail delivery (parcels) by Australia Post.

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      • #
        RickWill

        The variation in solar radiation is not small. Wind back 2,233,000 years and North Pole had average June sunlight of 593W/m^2. It is now only 502W/m^2. That makes a huge difference because it gets the peak daily intensity above the snow melt threshold of 770W/m^2.

        At the present time, the South Pole gets average daily December sunlight of 526W/m^2 and that is not enough to melt snow at 2000m elevation.

        The hemispherical variation in solar intensity is huge. The average December sunlight over the whole Southern Hemisphere rose from 430W/m^2 10,000 years ago to 480W/m^2 now. So a 50W/m^2 swing.

        The idea that CO2 somehow alters Earth’s energy balance is fantasy. All that is happening is the termination of the modern interglacial. Same thing has occurred 4 times in the past 500kyr.

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    Ross

    Those data points every one thousand years are so important. Within each of those data points there may have been a rapid cooling phase, a comet may have hit the earth or a major earthquake eruption. Or multiples of each. Look at “our” most recent 1000 years for all the huge variation in climate that has occurred. The earth has always had a variable climate, very often with very quick changes. The Younger Dryas being one of the most extreme. Post industrial revolution the earth has maybe experienced a 1-1.5 ˚C increase over 170 years – big deal.

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  • #
    farmerbraun

    “The climate in Greenland at the time varied between Arctic and temperate and was between 10-17C warmer than Greenland is today. ”

    ” the world was not just 1.5 catastrophic degrees warmer than today, but a full nuclear 10 to 17 degrees hotter.”

    ??

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    • #

      Greenland, then, was hotter than today.
      But I wonder whether the tropics were much – if any – hotter.
      My thinking is that the so-called ’emergent phenomena’ [Willis Eschenbach has written much on this, and I hope I have understood him] will prevent appreciable warming, at least of tropical waters – thus capping land temperatures, to some extent.
      If so, the difference in temperature between Tropics and polar regions would be less than today, hence, it seems to me, lesser tropical storms.

      The World was very different then.

      Auto

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  • #
    TdeF

    It’s amazing. Over millions of years everything changes but in an instant, mankind finds the perfect climate, the perfect time, the perfect level of CO2 in the atmosphere. And it must be preserved at all cost. What a coincidence that this occurred at the same instant that ecology was invented as a science.

    This reminds me of the joke title of the 1960’s file “Stop the World I want to get off”. Except that is it now called climate science.

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      Ross

      What’s worse is that climate alarmism can be traced to that 20 period (roughly 1980-2000) when we had rising CO2 and rising earth temps. Basically, as you point out, just a coincidence. No one every mentions that previous period (1945-1980) when the earth cooled but we also had rising CO2 levels.

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        David Maddison

        Actually, concerns about anthropogenic global warming started with some of the predecessors of the modern Left and environmental movement, the National Socialists.

        http://en.friends-against-wind.org/realities/how-renewables-and-the-global-warming-industry-are-literally-hitler

        In 1941, he published the first German-language article on global warming, the title of which translates as The Activity of Man as a Climate Factor.

        Also see Rupert Darwall’s book Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex.

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        • #
          TdeF

          And in the winter of 1941 it was the extremely cold winter which stopped Hitler’s Blitzkreig at the gates of Moscow. And again in 1942 at Stalingrad. And Napoleon’s Grand Armee of a million soldiers in 1812. Tens of thousands of men were frozen completely solid where they stood in a single night. The idea that the weather is predictable is a fantasy. That the weather is controllable is past ridiculous.

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        b.nice

        Actually, since 1979, the Earth atmosphere has only warmed in two main steps at the 1998 and 2015/16 El ninos

        For most of that time the temperature trend has been basically ZERO, and for the last 7 years .. cooling !

        There is absolutely zero evidence of any warming effect from the steady increase of CO2, on atmospheric temperatures in the last 45 years.

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      • #

        “No one every mentions that previous period (1945-1980) when the earth cooled but we also had rising CO2 levels.”

        The 1940s Blip is mentioned in the climate gate emails. My problem is the search engine that for some reason cannot find them.
        Oh well it goes here in stead. Not a bad backfire.

        “After 1940, temperatures fell into a trough and did not regain that level until 1980.”
        https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc5002.htm

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      Annie

      I was thinking of just that yesterday TdeF! ‘Stop the World, I want to get off’.

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        b.nice

        I don’t know about “I want to get off!”

        Yes, this climate nonsense is certainly crazy crap, but so long as you try to maintain you own sanity, and ride out the incredible idiocy of many of the nonsensical “climate actions™”, you should be able to continue your time on the planet.

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      RickWill

      Climate was perfect in 1850. It has gone to chist since then due to the industrial revolution when humans started burning coal. Since then that evil CO2 has wrought havoc on the climate.

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    Neville

    Of course no modern Humans existed 2 million years ago but Homo Erectus was roaming around and at least one or two other earlier Hominids.
    Modern Humans evolved about 200 K years ago, although their numbers were small for most of that time and may have collapsed about 70 K years ago because of a very nasty Indonesian volcanic eruption. Who knows?
    But we’re now living in a cooler interglacial period called the Holocene and have warmed slightly since the LIA and that was the coldest period for at least 10 K years.
    The Eemian interglacial was much warmer than today and sea levels and temps were much higher as well. So we know that Greenland area was much warmer and more ice melting then than the Holocene.
    BTW the global Human population was about 200 million people just 2 K years ago and the first billion estimated in about 1810 and every country had a life expectancy UNDER 40 years.
    Since then and our use of FOSSIL fuels our life expectancy has soared to about 73 years and the population has now reached 8 billion in 2022. THINK about it.

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    Alexy Scherbakoff

    It must have been catastrophic for the mastodon. After all, it died there.

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      RickWill

      Yes – it is sad that we use such deaths in the unscrupulous and vain effort to disprove the settled science. Earth’s climate was perfect before 1850 and no amount of so-called evidence will change that.

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    Neville

    BTW Willis Eschenbach summed up today’s Greenland temps at the request of Steve McIntyre a few years ago and showed that today “Greenland is way cool.”
    Here’s his summary using the latest Vinther study.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/08/greenland-is-way-cool/

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    el+gordo

    The closure of the Panama Seaway, just over two million years ago, dried out Africa and forced the apes to come down from the trees and scavenge on the savanna. It was the beginning of humanity.

    Here is a little more on the timing.

    https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ClDy…30….1L/abstract

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    Fromdownunder

    I don’t personally understand the problem with climate changing to quickly for adaptation. In USA we can already secretly fly undocumented immigrants several thousand miles between states very late at night, at taxpayers cost. How hard is us to fly around a few plants and animals around to help them migrate. As long as have the fossil fuel to run the planes we can mitigate any mass extinction.

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    • #

      You are on the right path 😀

      New Study: Observational Data Affirm 95% Of Post-1970s Warming Is Not Linked To CO2 Increases

      Internal changes to the thermal structure of the ocean transmit decadal-scale changes in the atmospheric circulation and consequent surface air temperature via its modulating impact on the variation in the amount and intensity of solar radiation (sunshine duration, or SD) reaching the Earth’s surface.

      This is not only observed for Poland and/or Europe as detailed in a new study, but the causal structuring of cloud cover changes driving the variations in solar radiation reaching the surface and modulating climate can be applied throughout the globe ( Wang et al., 2002, Wielicki et al., 2002, Loeb et al., 2021, Herman et al., 2013, Poprovsky, 2019, Dübal and Vahrenholt, 2021, Swift, 2018, Stephens et al., 2022).

      Therefore, “the main cause of the change in the state of the climate may be the action of the internal variability of the ocean–atmosphere system” (Marsz et al., 2022).

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    STJOHNOFGRAFTON

    And just like that it’s 2 million years ago. Where does this figure come from? It seems arbitary.
    I agree with the idea of debunking warmist dogma, but being definite about rubbery figures relating to past time lends itself to the same speculative fantasy as practiced by worshipers of
    Gaia from the warmist cult.

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      Gee Aye

      The answer to your question can be found in a different way to the last one I answered for you. The paper linked at the top discusses the dating and climate evidence in detail with citations. I know this is hard scienc,e but the fact that you don’t understand it doesn’t mean that it is driven by a warmist cult.

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    Neville

    BTW Willis also checked out their so called Climate Emergency and found NOTHING.
    But don’t worry we’ll waste trillions of $ on this TOXIC S & W fraud and con trick while the developing countries will prosper and use proper BASE-LOAD energy like fossil fuels, Hydro and Nuclear.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/

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    Bruce

    From a “rock-doctoring perspective, it seems worth asking whether Greenland was in those “olden” days.

    The mid-Atlantic trench / ridge has been shoving whole continents aside for a while now.

    Was Greenland further south and east of its current location when it was infested with mammalian megafauna?

    How long is the time-frame for the deposition of all these carcasses? If we are looking at many centuries or longer, then changing ocean currents / Solar behaviour may be likely suspects.

    If the corpses are arrayed in close proximity, consider something sudden..

    Consider the woolly mammoths found in Siberia. Not just one or two, buried in the permafrost, but dozens. And they died with their “boots on” and often with a mouthful of “lunch”. and the carcasses were not molested by scavengers before being interred in dusty snow.

    Rapid death, caused by massive overpressure, all scavengers also very dead?

    Comet or meteor strike? Huge amount of dust hurled high into the atmosphere to circulate for years. Increased planetary albedo, steady drop in temperatures.

    Interestingly enough, Greenland is in about the same latitudes as Siberia.

    Food for thought?

    Any actual geo and paleo types care to chime in?

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    Crakar24

    DNA lasting 2 million years, I think their carbon dating is broken.

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      David Maddison

      Carbon dating only works back as far as about 50,000 years. Presumably they used a different dating method.

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        Gee Aye

        the paper is linked. There you will find how things were dated plus citations for detailed studies into DNA degradation.

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    Geoffrey Williams

    Such a remarkable find in the bottom sediments of a fjord in Greenland. Just wonderful that some people have been able to unravel (should I say ungravel) so much information and knowledge from so little. Pity some of our climates scientist weren’t as smart . .

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    David Maddison

    For those wondering, at a typical continental drift rate of 2.5cm per year, Greenland would only have moved about 500km in that time.

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    b.nice

    On the map at the top…. it would be interesting to know how the place called “Lost Chicken” got its name

    Must be a very important villiage ! 😉

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      Bruce

      Old joke:

      Why did the chicken cross the road?”

      Col. Sanders: “You mean I missed one?”

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      MrGrimNasty

      Well according to the internet old time gold miners created a settlement and were saved from starvation by the abundant ptarmigan. They were going to name it after the bird but couldn’t spell it so called it chicken instead. The gold mine was lost and then relocated, hence Lost Chicken hill, mine, etc.

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    feral_nerd

    The most important finding to emerge, of course, is that our hominid ancestors drove SUVs.

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    greggg

    ‘In August of 1900, in the vast frozen plains of northeastern Siberia, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska, a hunter named Ewene Tarabykin was tracking an elk. As he walked along the banks of the Beryozovka River, he came across a most incredible sight. There, sticking out of the ice, was the carcass of an enormous wooly mammoth, unexpectedly uncovered after more than 40,000 years.’
    ‘When scientists began to examine the carcass more closely, they found something even more amazing. The animal’s stomach was filled with undigested food, swallowed, but without enough time to start the process of digestion. It was, according to one scientist, as if the mammoth had been “overwhelmed suddenly with a rapid deep freeze and instant death.’
    ‘But there was something even more bizarre – the food itself. The mammoth’s stomach contained over 40 different species of plants, many of which simply did not exist in Siberia, not then, nor at any time in the past. These were warm weather plants, the kind you find growing today in Mexico.’
    ‘So why were these mammoths being found in the coldest places on Earth? Some scientists had an answer – the wooly mammoth didn’t live in an arctic climate. Rather, they must have lived somewhere warm which somehow got very cold, very quickly.’

    https://universe-inside-you.com/pole-shift-hypothesis/

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    Uber

    DNA that survives millions of years? Science really has become a joke.

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    The caveat, pardon, fib, is just the compulsory sop to the gods of current mythology needed to convince a penpusher somewhere to cough up the next installment of the research grant.

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    CHRIS

    Everyone knows that Greenland was named by the Vikings when they landed on the island during the MVP. As for Mastodons…yehh OK, but it would have been in a previous WP.

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