Glacial Advance During The Little Ice Age

Discussion in 'Environment & Conservation' started by Josephwalker, Sep 11, 2018.

  1. Josephwalker

    Josephwalker Banned

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    In another thread I noted that I had stumbled on to the fact that the glaciers in Teton NP we're all formed during the little ice age. This got me thinking maybe all glaciers in the world that everyone is freaking about were formed or at least enlarged during this same era. Apparently that is the fact and glaciers worldwide are merely retreating to pre little ice age levels and ocean levels are rising to pre little ice age levels you can all relax. The world is not ending.

    "In 1589 the Allalin glacier in Switzerland descended so low that it blocked the Saas valley, forming a lake. The moraine broke a few months later, sending floods downstream. Seven years later 70 people died when similar floods from the Gietroz glacier submerged the town of Martigny.

    As the glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope thousands of acres of farm land were ruined and many villages were left uninhabitable such as La Bois where a government official noted “where there are still six houses. all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children…Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain”. Eventually the village was completely abandoned."

    "And at their subsequent advanced positions – probably around 500 BC as well as between 1650 and 1850 AD – the glaciers in the Alps regained an extent, estimated in the Glockner region, at about 5 times their Bronze Age Minimum, when all the smaller ones had disappeared."


    "Meanwhile, analysis of moraines shows that the Greenland Ice Sheet may have receded tens of kilometers within its present day margins during the early and mid Holocene, before reaching their maximum extents since the early Holocene during the Little Ice Age.

    Over in Alaska, it has been found that there were three separate glacial advances between the 12thC and 18thC. Remains of trees, dating back to the Middle Ages, are now reappearing there as the glaciers retreat.

    Brian Fagan also describes how:

    Ice sheets in Alaska, the Canadian Rockies and Mount Rainier in the NW United States moved forward simultaneously. Glaciers expanded at the same times during the 19th Century in the Caucasus, the Himalayas and China.

    The Qualccaya ice core in Peru provides evidence of frequent intense cold from 1500 to 1720, with prolonged droughts and cold cycles from 1720 to 1860.

    Studies of glaciers in South America come to similar conclusions.

    Thompson on the Quelccaya glacier in Peru:

    The fact that the Little Ice Age (about A.D. 1500 to 1900) stands out as a significant climatic event in the oxygen isotope and electrical conductivity records confirms the worldwide character of this event."

    "In New Zealand the Franz Joseph glacier wasa mere pocket of ice on a frozen snowfield nine centuries ago”…. Then Little Ice Age cooling began and the glacier thrust downslope into the valley below smashing into the great rain forests that flourished there, felling giant trees like matchsticks. By the early 18th Century, Franz Joseph’s face was within 3 km of the Pacific Ocean .

    The high tide of glacial advance at Franz Joseph came between the late 17th Century and early 19th Century, just as it did in the European Alps.

    It is evident that sea levels must have fallen during the Little Ice Age, not only because of glacial advance but also because of colder temperatures. Were sea levels higher than now during the MWP? Certainly HH Lamb believes so – see here.

    But even if they were not, it is clear that much of the 20thC rise in sea levels that we have seen is no more than a return to the conditions that existed 1000 years ago, before glaciers worldwide began to expand."

    https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/glacial-advance-during-the-little-ice-age/

     

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