Unbased first published on 10/28/2015
A lot of years ago, maybe sixty, I read an article in Reader’s Digest magazine I’ve always remembered. Every time I hear or read more about global climate change, my mind drifts back to that article. Before television, Reader’s Digest was one of my principal current windows to the world outside Hardy County.
A Mastodon, or perhaps a Wooly Mammoth, a big hairy elephant. looking beast, found frozen solid in a glacier in Siberia. Don’t remember how old it was or how long it was estimated to have been frozen there, but a long time.
Animal’s mouth still contained grasses and wild flowers it was eating when it froze. Gullet and stomach contained same materials not yet swallowed and digested. Quick frozen solid before it could chew and swallow. Fast. Unimaginable instant cold to stop so large an animal dead in it’s tracks.
Little or no warming period followed that freeze. No sign of rotting, deterioration one might expect if warm temperatures returned. Massive amounts of precipitation must have fallen almost immediately to form its insulating blanket of ice. A small part of the animal had thawed from the entombing glacier and showed bird and small animal damage, but remainder still covered by ice had no damage.
Conjecture in the article by scientists as to how such rapid temperature changes might have happened. One scenario I remember involved an opening in Earth’s atmosphere. Deep, deep freezing temperatures from outer space might have dropped through and blasted earth. Nobody knew then and nobody knows for sure now how such catastrophic changes might have occurred. Debate goes on.
But, what might have made that hole in our atmosphere? An asteroid? A collision with earth? Scientists have said we’ve been hit by chunks from space. They say the Chesapeake Bay is an impact scar. Area around the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico is another. Perhaps the whole Caribbean is remains of a crater.
Evidence indicates most living species on Earth died off within a very short time. Change from reptiles to mammals took place likely following a great die-off of the dinosaurs. Earth impacts of space bodies have led conjecture about the change.
Might Earth have been hit so hard its orbit changed? Perhaps its orientation, it’s spinning axis changed such that temperate areas became frozen and previously frozen areas warmed. Perhaps that initial penetration of Earth’s atmosphere punched the atmospheric hole and subsequent orbit/orientation change maintained catastrophic changes.
A movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”. It’s been around since 2004, but I only saw it recently. If I understood it correctly, the movie scenario involved global warming causing massive ice melts which change ocean currents with huge overload of fresh warmer water. Global warming under present projections would take a matter of years to produce conditions necessary for birth of a new Ice Age on Earth. In the movie that deep freeze happens practically over night.
Near instant freeze up as depicted in the movie is unlikely given years to prepare as conditions form at normal pace of nature. A triggering event would be necessary to produce changes so rapid as to leave intelligent humans totally unprepared. My conjecture of an asteroid strike might fit the trigger scenario better.
At any rate, I’ll not worry about an instant ice age any more than I’m worrying about global warming. Nothing I can do to alter progression of either event. Losing sleep won’t help and any influence I might bring to bear on earth’s changing events will be insufficient to change anything. I’ll not hunker down with a blanket over my head hoping catastrophe will pass me by. I’ll go out, head high marveling at the wonder of life I was given.
