Solar&Stone

Today's aurora and space weather 3-day forecast! 🌌 C5.5 flare last night as active region 4566 rotates off the Sun, with a 20% chance of M flares ☀️💥 Solar wind stays slow, so no storms 🌬️ Aurora: unlikely in Scotland next 3 nights💚👀 #spaceweather #aurora

EARTH'S DISASTER CYCLES PART 5 14,600 YEARS AGO, EARTH'S OCEANS BEGAN RISING AT AN EXTRAORDINARY RATE There is a period in Earth's history that I think deserves far more public attention. Around 14,600 years ago, during the last great ice-sheet retreat, sea level rose approximately 10 to 20 metres in an interval lasting no more than about 500 years. Scientists call it Meltwater Pulse 1A. We have physical evidence preserved in ancient shorelines, marine deposits, and coral records. A 2025 study in Nature Geoscience examined where the water came from and how the loss of ice across different regions contributed to the rise. Now consider what this would have meant for people living at the time. During the last ice age, sea level had been roughly 120 metres lower than today. Enormous areas that are now underwater were once dry land. Coastal plains stretched far beyond modern shorelines. Rivers followed different courses. Landscapes existed that have since disappeared beneath the oceans. As the ice sheets melted, those environments changed. Not in one worldwide tsunami, but through sustained sea-level rise that could transform coastlines within generations. In North America, huge ice-dammed lakes repeatedly burst, sending catastrophic floods across the Pacific Northwest. Those floods happened again and again as the ice dams rebuilt and failed. This is where my interest in ancient flood traditions meets the geological record. We know enormous floods occurred. We know coastlines disappeared. We know human populations were living through these changes. What we don't yet know is how much of that experience survived through oral history. I believe that question deserves a serious investigation grounded in archaeology, geology, and the actual dates.

EARTH'S DISASTER CYCLES PART 4 THE LAST 150,000 YEARS WERE FAR MORE VIOLENT THAN MOST PEOPLE REALIZE We tend to imagine the last ice age as a long, frozen period where very little changed. That's not what the geological record shows. The planet repeatedly shifted between colder and warmer conditions, sometimes with remarkable speed. During the last glacial period, Greenland experienced around 25 abrupt warming events known as Dansgaard Oeschger events. In some cases, temperatures in Greenland rose by several degrees, sometimes approaching 10°C, over just decades. Then came longer periods of cooling. Meanwhile, massive ice sheets covering parts of North America repeatedly released enormous numbers of icebergs into the Atlantic. These are known as Heinrich events. The icebergs carried rocks and sediment into the ocean, leaving physical evidence that scientists can still identify today. Some of these events appear to have affected ocean circulation and climate across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Then, around 14,700 years ago, the North Atlantic region warmed rapidly. Around 12,900 years ago, it abruptly became colder again during the Younger Dryas.And around 11,700 years ago, temperatures rose sharply as the current warm period began. Think about that sequence. Warming. Cooling. Massive ice discharges. Shifting oceans. Then another sudden warming. I find it difficult to look at this record and describe Earth's climate as naturally steady. But I also think we need to understand something. These events happened under glacial conditions very different from those we experience today. The question isn't whether the exact same sequence is about to repeat. It's what caused these enormous changes, why some happened so quickly, and whether similar physical processes could operate again.