What happened to cause this last time and why is today different?
Greenland ice completely melted 7,000 years ago and could happen again
A new study from GreenDrill — a project co-led by the University at Buffalo to recover rock and sediment buried beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet — has revealed that the Prudhoe Dome ice cap completely vanished about 7,000 years ago. This is far more recent than scientists had previously believed.
The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, show that this elevated region in the northwest part of the ice sheet is highly sensitive to even modest warming. The melting occurred during the Holocene, the relatively stable climate period that began 11,000 years ago and continues today.
“This is a time known for climate stability, when humans first began developing farming practices and taking steps toward civilization. So for natural, mild climate change of that era to have melted Prudhoe Dome and kept it retreated for potentially thousands of years, it may only be a matter of time before it begins peeling back again from today’s human-induced climate change,” says Jason Briner, PhD, professor and associate chair of the Department of Earth Sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, who co-led GreenDrill with Joerg Schaefer PhD, research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Obviously, the article completely ignores why the melting back then was different from the melting now. The answer would be inconvenient.
The Prudhoe ice dome has an area of about 1000 square miles (the Greenland ice sheet is about 800,000 square miles). That’s just over 1% melted.
As explained in the article…
The Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) was a warming period some 8000 to 6000 years ago where the Earth (especially the Northern Hemisphere) warmed. The warming was primarily driven by long-term changes in Earth’s orbit, leading to increased summer solar radiation (insolation) in the Northern Hemisphere.
The current bout of rapid warming appears to be caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, not by changes in the Earth’s orbit.
The Best Editorial Page online is . . .
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-best-editorial-page-online-is.html
That Donald! How did he manage to melt Greenland before he was born!
Donny wasn’t “born”, he sprang from the bowels of Satan!
BTW, a friend asks: Whom do you believe, the murderous Islamic theocrats or the unhinged white Christian nationalists?
Our avowed agnostic wrote:
It’s good to know that our socialist from St Louis is adopting some form of Christianity, although it’s probable that he’s attracted to one of the idiot sects with priestesses.
It seems that our angry Ozarkian can’t tell the difference between people who would kill every one of us if they could and people who want to save the Western civilization all of us here enjoy. Because he disapproves of their beliefs, he equates them with the mad, and thankfully mostly dead, mullahs of Iran.
Does the kaukasian kristian of kentucky approve of the stream of lies spewing out of trumpepstein?
Did the murderous Islamic theocrats threaten to destroy an entire civilization, or was that your unhinged white christian nationalist?
He started this stupid “excursion” without a plan and now has the Earth on the verge of WWIII.
That’s just your incoherent opinions not backed up by any relevant facts, Rimjob.
Omigod, WWIII… LOL.
Try to keep up.
HC Richardson…
This morning, Trump said Iran wanted “to close up the strait again, you know, as they’ve been doing for years, and they can’t blackmail us.”
In fact, the strait was open until Trump began to bomb Iran on February 28.
Trump’s choice of the word “blackmail” is interesting in this context, for there have been no public threats of exposing someone’s secrets or threatening harm to them in association with the crisis in Iran.
Relax Rimjob, you’ve lost.
8000 years ago the melting was caused by orbital changes. (Milankovitch cycles)
Teach conveniently leaves that out. The current warming is happening about 10 times as fast. Teach, what is the cause?
No, Johnny. Liu et al 2026 and Vettoretti et al 2026, amongst several others, show numerous Greenland temp changes (D-O events) of 10-16C within several decades. Alleged intervals estimated to be between several hundred years to 1500 years. That small time frame wouldn’t be Milankovitch cycles. And obviously 10-16C change, if true, is a much greater rate than todays.
Relax! You’ve won the day, if not the debate. Little wlll be done deliberately to slow greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, many actions are taking actions to INCREASE emissions! Live it up! Your great-grandchildren will be the judges.
Would you please either supply complete citations or link to the papers you wish for us to read?
from one Liu et al 2026 paper we find: “These reconstructions show that the largest warming occurred in northern extratropics, especially Eurasia, while western North America and the southern extratropics were characterised by cooling.”
Reconstructions?? You mean “models”. Anyway they claim the changes were local! Warming in Eurasia, cooling in North America.
https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/22/205/2026/cp-22-205-2026.pdf
Anyway… “Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O) events are 25 rapid climate fluctuations—abrupt warming followed by gradual cooling — that occurred during the last glacial period, roughly 110,000 to 23,000 years ago.”
Are you suggesting the rapid melting of the Prudhoe ice dome 7000 years ago was from a previously undetected D-O event? Do you feel that the current warming event is a D-O event?
Wacko Chief Climate Change Denier now claims Earth is cooling
Teach ignores
As opposed to Biden saying earlier that climate change is “a cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be anymore desperate or any more clear”. Where’s the desperate part?
Believe me, if I could get a link to work on this site I would. Maybe 1 in 20 tries works and yes, it could be something I’m doing, but the fact that some links work some of the time is baffling..
I was responding to Johnny’s post on Greenland so that’s what I was responding to. As far as local, the Vettoretti paper lists papers who claim D-O events were worldwide. Adolphi 2018, Corrick 2020, Harrison and Goni 2010, Goni 2017, and Voelker 2002.
“D-O event causing warming now?” Don’t know
But anyway, links to the papers can be found at NTZ. Type in “Greenland warming”
You need to use the proper code to set up links. It’s the text you want to highlight , with the hyperlink pasted in between the quotation marks. you need to delete the extra spaces I added between the < and a at the beginning and at the end to make it work.
Back to the topic…
The Prudhoe ice dome has an area of about 1000 square miles (the Greenland ice sheet is about 800,000 square miles). That’s just over 1% melted.
Mr Teach claimed “the article completely ignores why the melting back then was different from the melting now. The answer would be inconvenient.”
But from the article that Mr Teach may not have read:
“The Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) was a warming period some 8000 to 6000 years ago where the Earth (especially the Northern Hemisphere) warmed. The warming was primarily driven by long-term changes in Earth’s orbit, leading to increased summer solar radiation (insolation) in the Northern Hemisphere.”
The current bout of rapid warming appears to be caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, not by changes in the Earth’s orbit.
No wonder Teach wants to hide facts and you’uns always want to change the subject. LOL.