06-14-2008, 08:23 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Saturn
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Tibet was warmer & wetter 2 million years ago
Climate changes, folks....
Tibet Was Warmer and Wetter Two Million Years Ago
Quote:
Working 15,000 feet up on the cold, treeless, rocky desert of the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, an international research team was surprised to find thick layers of lake sediment filled with plant, fish and animal fossils typical of lower elevations and warmer, wetter climates.
Back at the U.S. National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the fossils has revealed that the animals lived recently in geologic terms - just two to three million years ago - and their diet was made up of abundant plants.
The scientists determined that "a drastic climate change" was the reason for their demise during the late Pliocene era, about two or three million years ago.
The scientific team says that fossil evidence suggests that movements of the Earth's crust caused the Tibetan Plateau to rise to its towering current elevations - making it inhospitable to the plants and animals that thrived there as recently as two million years ago, not millions of years earlier than that, as geologists previously believed.(more...)
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