Dinosaurs were pretty big – and yes, that’s how evolution had them in mind

All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey – which means it’s time for the Geological Society of America annual meeting.

A couple of days packed with discussions and research presentations about stuff you did not know in advance you would turn out to find interesting (like ‘Anthropocene geomorphology‘) – to get you to bridge the long-days-baking-hot-Sun fieldwork season and the season of long lonesome nights filled with proper indoors academic paperwork, to romanticise the geoscientist’s bearded existence – like the size of dinosaurs…

dinosaurs evolution
Dinosaur scale comparison. That’s you in the left corner standing and waving. That red one planning to eat you is an ornithopod species. And that extremely big one is a member of the sauropod clade, not so friendly if you’d happen to be a plant. These Cretaceous folks are so big because they were very, very patient for many millions of years, researchers say. Image Wikimedia Commons.

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Local Indonesian El Niño progression, possibility strong wildfire season Borneo, Sumatra

Over the course of 2012 ENSO has moved from La Niña to El Niño state. Various ENSO forecasting models (see NOAA NECP, IRI ensemble below) now show Pacific equatorial SSTs anomalies will remain positive for the remainder of 2012 – albeit decreasing, possibly transgressing to negative temperature anomalies in early 2013 (NOAA NCEP) but within margins (±0.5C) of neutral ENSO state.

El Niño forecast
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Can’t see a problem in the middle of a greenhouse? CO2 clouds the mind – from 1000+ ppm

Hypercapnia it turns out, develops much more gradually than previously assumed. Apparently long before we pass thresholds that mean real medical trouble, our bodies – and our minds – can be disturbed by elevated CO2 levels in the air around us.

CO2 levels hypercapnia
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Europe can have warm Gulf Stream and ice age cold peak simultaneously

Gulf Stream ice ageJudging by new ocean sediment measurements and climate model runs the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was ‘at least as strong’ during the last ice age’s Last Glacial Maximum as it is today.

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´Medieval Warm Period should simply be named Medieval Period´

There is climatology and there is paleoclimatology. And then there is something in between. You thought yesterday´s trip to the early Pleistocene was geologically speaking exactly that, a trip to yesterday? Well, in that case today we go only a single minute back in time, to the late Holocene – or Middle Ages to be more precise.

Medieval Warm Period
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Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary: did Eltanin asteroid kickstart the ice ages?

Sediment deposits along shores of Antarctica, New Zealand and Chile suggest over 2 million years ago something big must have plunged somewhere in the middle of that triangle, creating a mega tsunami with hundreds of meters high waves engulfing coastal areas.

Eltanin asteroid Pleistocene ice ages
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Arctic sea ice literally halved – September 2012 smashes old record, 3.29 million km2 ice gone

Arctic sea ice records 2012 vs 2007

Comparing sea ice extent of 2007 and 2012 melt records in NSIDC Arctic Ocean map.

As the days shorten and the summer sun is slowly setting under the horizon, the frost is returning to the Arctic and American scientists make up the balance of what has turned out to be an unprecedented melting season.

The new melting record was probably reached on September 16, at a minimum sea ice extent of 3.41 square kilometers. That is the lowest ever recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979, and 49 percent under the average extent of the period between 1979-2000. The 2007 record was broken by a margin of 18 percent, or 0.76 million square kilometers of ice.

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