Danish Arctic research dates Ice Age
The result of a Danish ice drilling project has become the international standard for the termination of the last glacial period. It ended precisely 11,711 years ago.
Edited by Julian Isherwood, Dagbladet Politiken, 11. dec. 2008 [here]
A Danish ice drilling project has conclusively ended the discussion on the exact date of the end of the last ice age.
The extensive scientific study shows that it was precisely 11,711 years ago - and not the indeterminate figure of ‘some’ 11,000 years ago – that the ice withdrew, allowing humans and animals free reign.
According to the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen, the very precise dating of the end of the last Ice Age has made Denmark the owner of the “Greenwich Mean Time” of the end of the last glacial period and beginning of the present climate – the so-called International Standard Reference.
It took several thousand years to warm up the earth and melt the kilometre thick ice caps that covered large parts of the northern hemisphere during the last glacial period and as a result the transition from Ice Age to the current period has lacked a clearly defined point in time.
The answer has now been found in the NordGrip drilling project in Greenland. … [more]
Note: The date above refers to the end of the Younger Dryas stadial. The Bretz Floods tore through and over the Columbia Plateau, Willamette Valley, and Puget Basin from 15.3-13 kya during the Bølling and Allerød oscillations immediately preceding and following the Older Dryas stadial.
Over 60 such monster floods (jokulhlaups) draining Glacial Lake Missoula, identified in layers of silt, occurred between 15.3 and 13 kya. Additional floods came from Glacial Lake Bonneville, estimated to have covered 10 times the area of the remnant Great Salt Lake, about 14.5 kya. Glacial Lake Bonneville catastrophically drained in jokulhlaups that flowed down the Snake River to the Columbia.
More evidence of cataclysmic jokulhlaups is found in Box Canyon of the Big Lost River in Idaho, also draining into the Snake River. Discharge rates there are estimated to have been 60,000 cubic meters per second. This would be some kind of record, except that the discharge rate of Glacial Lake Missoula is estimated to have been 17,000,000 cubic meters per second, and that wins the prize.