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Alabama's Underwater Forest

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  • Alabama's Underwater Forest

    15 miles off the coast of Alabama, the story of, and documentary describing, the 60,000 year old intact underwater forest uncovered by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.....

    The forest appears to be a wholly unique relic of our planet's past, the only known site where a coastal ice age forest this old has been preserved in place.
    Rhode Island

  • #2
    Very interesting article Charlie, kind of eye opening too. Hard to imagine those kind of dramatic changes in such a short time frame. I hope that's not what my kids are in for but it really does look that way to me.
    Josh (Ky/Tn collector)

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    • #3
      I hope that it doesn't get cold enough to extend the shoreline that far in our lifetime. Interesting.
      Michigan Yooper
      If You Don’t Stand for Something, You’ll Fall for Anything

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Ron Kelley View Post
        I hope that it doesn't get cold enough to extend the shoreline that far in our lifetime. Interesting.
        Yea something to think about ....
        As for me and my house , we will serve the lord

        Everett Williams ,
        NW Arkansas

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        • Bone2stone
          Bone2stone commented
          Editing a comment
          Doubt that the shoreline would extend out in so much as disappear underwater.
          Rising waters would devastate/flood out cities across the globe.

      • #5
        Thanks for sharing Charlie, very interesting!
        http://joshinmo.weebly.com

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        • #6
          Isn't that amazing!
          South Dakota

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          • #7
            A most extraordinary read to be sure.
            Still under examination by Paleo botanist and Entomologists, as well as other fields of science.
            Certainly worth further study.

            Sea levels rising that fast would rival any apocalyptic doomsday movie.
            It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when and how fast this will happen again.

            Thank you Charlie for bringing this scenario to our attention.
            This could certainly happen again within our children's lifetime!!!!!!

            Many of our most populous cities around the world would be in peril.

            Jess B.
            It is a "Rock" when it's on the ground.
            It is a "Specimen" when picked up and taken home.

            ​Jessy B.
            Circa:1982

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            • #8
              Hi Charlie. Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. I live in the area now and this discovery is not common knowledge (yet) of most of the people who live here. Hurricane Ivan was a very bad one. The worst in many years. Its severity was soon forgotten my most people in our country when Hurricane Katrina blasted the coast a year later. I had an offshore capable fishing boat on a boat lift near Mobile Bay that was yanked off the lift by a surge on Mobile Bay and it tossed it into the yard several feet above normal sea level along with some other boats. We had to get a crane to come in and hoist them onto trailers to take them to boat yards for repair. We were in the eye of that storm. This is some amazing science. Talk about dark clouds with silver linings. You have a great eye for very interesting news.

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              • CMD
                CMD commented
                Editing a comment
                Well, glad you were able to at least repair the boat and not lose it altogether. In my youth, we used to get some strong hurricanes here in RI. It's been decades really by now, though Sandy grazed us and did some damage on our Atlantic coast....

            • #9
              It's hard to imagine flash flooding on that scale? I guess all that water trapped in the glaciers makes for a dangerous world. I can see how a warm spell could cause a huge glacial lake to form and all $#%£ breaking loose when it spills over and flows! No doubt global warming has been a great thing for mankind over the last 12,000 years or so.

              Von
              Last edited by Von; 07-21-2017, 10:15 AM.

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              • #10
                And yet there are those who deny it...
                Child of the tides

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                • Von
                  Von commented
                  Editing a comment
                  There's two predictions that can be made that are absolute truth. Those are that the earth will warm and it will cool. History shows how this relates to us. Historically we thrive when it's warm and die from famine and plague caused by crop failures when it's cold. The real problem we face is global cooling and it will happen. I can see a time in the not so distant future where futile attempts to control global cooling are made. Just like now the train will have left the station long ago and like us they will just have to hang on and ride it out. The difference being that they will have a real serious problem.

                  Von
                  Last edited by Von; 07-22-2017, 02:51 PM.

              • #11
                But today few realize the very real danger of the ocean's currents, like the Gulf Stream, flooded with melting ice water & shutting down. The effect on our weather will be immediate & catastropic. To deny it exists or to deny mankind's burgeoning population & its impact on our world is like so many ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, which is soon to be inundated. I see the effects every day in my own part of the world.
                Child of the tides

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                • #12
                  I believe the effects of extreme heat on human beings is far worse then the effects of extreme cold: The information below makes it very clear that we cannot live, we die, once the temps have risen past a certain point. It is not global cooling that we have to be concerned with. It is abundantly clear that it is global warming. I can dress for 30 below zero. I cannot dress for 130. We do not thrive when it's warm enough to kill us. There is an annotated version of this article, and the article itself is now the most read article in New York Magazine history. The extract I have posted below, on "Heat Death", is only a portion of the full article, available at the link, and there is also a link there for the expanded annotated version.

                  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...or-humans.html

                  HEAT DEATH

                  Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

                  Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees. The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air (since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air, this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress comes much sooner.

                  Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.

                  It is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course, heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys, too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.
                  Last edited by CMD; 07-22-2017, 12:01 PM.
                  Rhode Island

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                  • Bone2stone
                    Bone2stone commented
                    Editing a comment
                    [Gloom and doom]
                    This commentary does not bring into view the catastrophic effects this change is bringing to our oceans as well.
                    Coral reefs once a flourishing environment becomes a vast coral skeleton devoid of viable life.
                    This effect is occurring within our lifetime and will continue.
                    Australia's "Great Barrier Reef" is disappearing at a phenomenal rate.
                    Coral reefs may reestablish elsewhere at least till further heating destroys that area as well.
                    Last edited by Bone2stone; 07-22-2017, 11:38 AM.

                  • CMD
                    CMD commented
                    Editing a comment
                    The article does go into the effects on the oceans. It is a very lengthy and comprehensive article, and the annotated version even more so. I simply extracted the short section dealing with the effects of heat itself.

                  • Bone2stone
                    Bone2stone commented
                    Editing a comment
                    "o -i -c"

                • #13
                  You folks are making me seriously consider buying real estate in Alaska!

                  Von

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