Glaciers Reveal Tree Stumps from a Warmer Period

By Ronald Stein, P.E.

Published July 12, 2021

Originally posted on Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)

Ancient tree stumps found under glaciers in Southeast Iceland are confirmed to be roughly 3,000 years old, RUV reports. A specialist believes the remarkably well-preserved stumps were part of a massive forest that disappeared after a long period of a warm climate.

It is believed that 3,000 years ago, the forests were much larger, even reaching the highlands. Approximately 500 BC, the climate became colder, and glaciers began to form, destroying parts of the forests.

The planet has been here billions of years, with mankind only having been here for the last million or so. In that time, the planet has changed climates several times.

With four of the last five warming cycles having occurred before humans and their kin were even around, the causes have got to be attributable to Mother Nature and the solar system. Today, President Biden has called climate change “the number one issue facing humanity”, implying that humanity is more powerful than Mother Nature and the solar system that caused the previous four warming cycles.

The Earth has existed for maybe 4.5 billion years, and now the alarmists will have us believe that because of the small rise in temperature for roughly 150 years, we are doomed.

The World is 87 percent uninhabitable with 70 percent covered by oceans and 17 percent being the mountains and deserts, while the remaining 13 percent of habitable area is up for discussions as to whether humans, animals, plants, Mother Nature, or the solar system have contributed to past and current climate changes.

During the last Ice Age, glaciers covered 32 percent of land. Today, about 10 percent of Earth’s land is covered with glaciers.

Obviously, natural forces greater than humans and fossil fuels caused the previous four warming cycles before humanity appeared, that melted the ice, so can the current humans’ minuscule presence on earth be the cause of the next warming cycle?

Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region’s rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum. Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles north of Vancouver, British Columbia. Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the stumps revealed the wood was far from fresh—some of it dated back to within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age.

Here in America, Glacier National Park might soon need a new name. The Montana park has 26 named glaciers today, down from 150 in 1850. Those that remain are typically mere remnants of their former frozen selves, a new gallery of before and after images reveals.

All arguments about global warming aside, now is a time of clear retreat by age-old ice packs in many locations around the world. Some retreat just a few inches or feet per year, but others are melting faster than a snow cone in Texas.

Humans have been monitoring temperatures since we have had meteorologists, which is about the last 150 years. On a 24-hour clock, those 150 years in which we have been monitoring temperatures, out of the 4.5 billion years that earth has been around, represent 0.00288th of a second!

Without the existence of human beings or fossil fuels to blame for the previous five warming cycles that melted the ice from the previous five ice ages, we are left with a troublesome question.

Namely, how can the presence of humans and fossil fuels, for “0.00288th of a second” on the “24-hour clock,” on the 13 percent of the earth’s surface that is habitable land mass, have any influence, as compared to all the natural forces that have caused the five previous warming cycles and climate changes over the last 4.5 billion years?

The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to micromanage the data, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Over the billions of years, ice ages have come and gone, and sea levels have risen and fallen. Temperatures have swung wildly going into and out of the ice ages periods, with virtually no human presence, nor fossil fuel energy usage over those billions of years. Sea animals’ fossils are somewhat common to find in the “mountains” during the weather swings over the billions of years.

The world has gone through numerous cooling and warming cycles, most of which occurred naturally before humans and their kin were even around. Maybe the latest reforestation of earth from the current warming cycle will be the same trees to be buried under the next cooling cycle that Mother Nature or the solar system will provide in the coming centuries.

Ronald Stein, P.E.

Ronald Stein is an internationally published columnist and energy consultant, and a policy advisor for The Heartland Institute.

Sphinx Glacier: 4,900 years old. Glacier in background. (Image credit: Johannes Koch)

Melting glaciers in Western Canada are revealing tree stumps up to 7,000 years old where the region's rivers of ice have retreated to a historic minimum, a geologist said today. Johannes Koch of The College of Wooster in Ohio found the fresh-looking, intact tree stumps beside retreating glaciers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Vancouver, British Columbia. Radiocarbon dating of the wood from the stumps revealed the wood was far from fresh—some of it dated back to within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age.

"The stumps were in very good condition, sometimes with bark preserved," said Koch, who conducted the work as part of his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Koch will present his results on Oct. 31 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver.

The pristine condition of the wood, he said, can best be explained by the stumps having spent all of the last seven millennia under tens to hundreds of meters of ice. All stumps were still rooted to their original soil and location.

Interstadial stumps can be found in various locations throughout the park. These stumps are left over from forests that thrived prior to the last ice age. As the glacier that carved Glacier Bay advanced, these trees were sheared to their stumps, covered by thick ice and sediment, and then exposed once more as the glacier retreated.

The oldest interstadial stump found in Glacier Bay is a 9,400-year-old specimen from upper Muir Inlet

Glacier Bay is the largest known repository in North America of interstadial wood from the Holocene period—the geological epoch that began at the end of the Pleistocene about 11,700 years ago and continues today. Delving into this storehouse of data, the researchers seek to reconstruct the paleoclimate and the highly complex sequence of glacial advance and retreat during the Holocene in the Glacier Bay region. A 1,500-year-long “master” chronology from Prince William Sound correlates well with chronologies from Glacier Bay. Tree-ring records from living trees have been correlated with meteorological records from Sitka dating back to the 1830s. Data suggests that at least six cycles of glacial advance and recession have occurred within the last 5,200 years in Glacier Bay. Probably none of these except the neoglacial (most recent) advanced all the way to the mouth of the bay. Advance and retreat in the west and east arms of the bay occurred asynchronously. Almost all the interstadial wood in Glacier Bay is Sitka spruce or western hemlock. The oldest in situ (rooted in place) interstadial stump found in Glacier Bay is a 9,400-year-old specimen from upper Muir Inlet. The Sitka spruce had been growing for 200 years when it was buried in sediment deposited by advancing ice. Twigs found in Reid Inlet were dated to 13,770 years ago.

A forest revealed under glacial ice

Posted on September 25, 2013

August 17, 2015

Icy view of Mendenhall Glacier in wintertime. Frozen Mendenhall Lake in foreground. / (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (no author listed))

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists –

Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier is shrinking, and its retreating ice has bared the remains of an ancient forest. Preserved stumps and trunks, many still rooted and even bearing bark, sit in a gravelly mix of stone churned up by the glacier. The trees are being exposed to open air for the first time in over two thousand years.

Cataloging melting glaciers

The Jakobshavn glacier imaged July 7, 2001, with overlayed lines displaying historic calving fronts. Historic locations in gray, 1850 through 1964, compiled by Anker Weidick and Ole Bennike. Newer locations in color, 2001 through 2006, derived from satellite imagery. / Courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Glaciers are rivers of ice created when years of snowfall accumulate in high elevations and slowly compact into ice. The ice, summoned by gravity due to its own colossal weight, slides in agonized slow motion downslope over the course of many years. Glaciers which accumulate enough new snowfall to more than balance the water they lose (due to melting) have a positive mass balance; the snow compacts into new glacial ice and the glacier advances downslope. Most of Alaska’s glaciers are retreating. Factors like warm summer temperatures, low winter precipitation, and high pressure systems that encourage sunny weather inflict a trend of glacier ice melting faster than it collects new ice.

GLIMS, the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space, is working to inventory the world’s approximately 160,000 glaciers. The project database combines information gathered by satellite, by airborne analyzing tools, and by on-the-ground measurements. GLIMS aims to provide detailed numeric information and picture records of the changing nature of our globe’s glaciers through time. The project was developed jointly by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Their work will help us understand how glaciers are responding to a warming climate, which is important because glacial runoff both contributes to sea level rise and regulates regional fresh water supplies.

Ice cave under Mendenhall Glacier, 1991. / Photographer Commander John Bortniak, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Forests at the edge of the ice

Alaska’s Juneau ice-field is home to 32 glaciers. Only one of them is currently increasing in size: the Taku Glacier. Compared to its neighbors, Taku begins at a higher elevation, a place where modern-day snowfall accumulates with more certainty. Today, the Taku Glacier is sealing cottonwood trees in ice just as the Mendenhall once descended on an ancient boreal forest. As Taku’s ice grinds slowly downhill, it crushes rock into smaller pieces. Spring and summer heat releases meltwater from the advancing edge of the glacier along with stony detritus. Before the ice ever reaches the trees, their trunks become buried in layers of pebbles. When the ice arrives it snaps off the tops of the trees. Meltwater carries the branches and leaves downstream toward the ocean, but the trunks remain rooted below.

As Taku engulfs a forest today, it gives researchers a good idea of what happened millennia ago at the site of Mendenhall Glacier. The ancient trees are likely spruce, and University of Alaska Southeast Environmental Science Program coordinator Professor Cathy Connor called the place “The tomb of the king spruce tree.” Spruce trees and northern pine have a long history of existing at the edge of the ice. Our planet has experienced a series of repeated ice ages, in which glaciers and ice sheets grew and then retreated. Just 18,000 years ago, most of North America was covered in the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and living vegetation could only find fertile ground in the south. As the glaciers slowly retreated, boreal forests followed the southern edge of the ice northward. It was not until about 6,000 years ago that the continental ice sheets were melted, allowing forests to resemble their current incarnations.

Our climate, then and now

Glaciers have advanced and retreated historically is not a reason to set aside concern about anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change today. We have a history of ice ages, and small alterations in the Earth’s orbit do, over the span of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, slightly alter the energy balance by changing how much sunlight reaches different latitudes, but those are slow processes. The changes happening now are occurring at lightning speed compared to climate shifts of the past. Warming is escalating: Earth has warmed twice as fast in the last 50 years as in the 50 years prior.

Temperature and CO2 levels are historically closely tied, and we have a record of CO2 levels spanning the last 450,000 years. During that time, CO2 never rose over 280 parts per million. In 1950 CO2 levels began spiking; by 2009 they had reached 388 parts per million. Industrialization, fossil fuel dependence, and altered land use policies -human endeavors- have all increased greenhouse gases like CO2 which keep heat trapped in Earth’s atmosphere. Human actions interact with the natural processes of our incredibly complex climate system, and we are still working to understand all the implications.

Kings of the boreal forest

Much like the layers glimpsed in ice cores and ocean sediment can help scientists understand our climate past, the tree rings in the stumps preserved below Mendenhall Glacier can give us information about past climates, such as how much precipitation fell and what the atmosphere resembled. They are a record from the past which can help us analyze our own future.

You can view beautiful pictures of the forest remains coming to light under Mendenhall’s ice by visiting the feature article at LiveScience.

Mendenhall Glacier in the Tongass National Forest outside of Juneau, Alaska, 2011. / (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Frontier Scientists: presenting scientific discovery in the Arctic and beyond

References:

● ‘Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest ‘tomb” Mary Catharine Martin, Juneau Empire (2013) http://juneauempire.com/outdoors/2013-09-13/ancient-trees-emerge-frozen-fo rest-tomb#.UkOQ7IY3uA9

● ‘Ancient Forest Thaws From Melting Glacial Tomb’ Laura Poppick, Live Science (2013) http://www.livescience.com/39819-ancient-forest-thaws.html

● ‘Sizing Up the Earth’s Glaciers’ Evelyne Yohe, National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Earth Observatory (2004) http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GLIMS/

● ‘The Migrating Boreal Forest’ Rebecca Lindsey, National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Earth Observatory (2002) http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BorealMigration/boreal_migration.p hp

FEBRUARY 19, 2021

‘Ghost forest’ got run over by a glacier

Posted by larryohanlon

By Ned Rozell

As a few scientists hiked a path between the ice towers of a Southeast Alaska glacier and crashing ocean waves in 2016, they topped a ridge and saw massive tree trunks poking from gravel ahead. The dead, sheared-off rainforest stems pointed toward the ocean like skeletal fingers.

In this “ghost forest,” not visible to fisherman or others passing by on ships, the researchers had stumbled on something they just had to study.

A “ghost forest” exposed as La Perouse Glacier in Southeast Alaska retreated. In the past, the glacier ran over the rainforest trees. Two people are also in the photo. Photo by Ben Gaglioti.

Ben Gaglioti ponders the ecology of ancient landscapes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Water and Environmental Research Center. He is leading a study on the ghost forest near the tongue of La Perouse Glacier, which flows from the St. Elias Mountains almost all the way to the Gulf of Alaska.

On that trip when he and his fellow researchers first saw the gray trunks of huge trees clipped off 20 feet above the ground, Gaglioti guessed their fate: La Perouse Glacier had run them over, after first shoring up the stems with gravel from its own outwash. The glacier had since shrunk backward, revealing the stumps.

Gaglioti and his colleagues including UAF’s Dan Mann and Greg Wiles of the College of Wooster in Ohio used tree corers to learn when the trees died, which told them about when the glacier advanced. They matched the growth rings with living rainforest trees that were nearby, but out of the glacier’s path.

They found that La Perouse Glacier had bulldozed the trees some time from 1850 to 1866, around when the Civil War was happening and Abraham Lincoln was president.

By coring other living trees in the area, including western hemlock, Sitka spruce, Alaska yellow cedar and mountain hemlock, the scientists found that the ghost forest had established itself in the path of La Perouse Glacier by about the year 1206. That was many centuries before the glacier rumbled forward to consume them.

Why did the glacier overrun the trees?

About the time La Perouse Glacier was advancing, most of the world was experiencing cooler temperatures. Researchers call the period from about 1250 to about 1900 the Little Ice Age. Global temperatures then averaged several degrees cooler than previous centuries.

Scientists aren’t certain what caused the Little Ice Age, but these are possible reasons: lower radiation reaching Earth from the sun, aerosols from multiple volcanic eruptions that deflected the sun’s rays, changes in ocean circulation, variations in Earth’s orbit and 11