Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, even if I was trying” by David Middleton

From the American Association for the Advancement of Science of America…

While the Messinian Salinity Crisis and subsequent Zanclean Megaflood comprise one of the most incredible episodes in geologic history… So incredible that the uppermost stage of the Miocene epoch is named the Messinian and the lowermost stage of the Pliocene epoch is named the Zanclean… There was no MASS extinction associated with it.

The AAAS of A article references a very interesting paper:

Agiadi and her colleagues have now traced the extinctions and subsequent recovery with a comprehensive analysis of most of the fossils from this region, published today in Science Advances.

Fossils tell tale of devastating mass extinction when Mediterranean dried up

So… Not only was it not a mass extinction.., It was an extinction from which there was a recovery. Why use the word “extinction” at all? Let’s go to the subject research paper:

Coral reef biodiversity

The cooling directly affected temperature-sensitive organisms such as the tropical reef-building z-corals and their associated faunas (reef fishes and sharks) and bryozoans, leading to local extinction of vast populations, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1) (40). In addition, the decrease of water temperatures in the Mediterranean allowed boreal species to expand their distribution to the basin during the Messinian, while strongly thermophilic Tethyan relic species disappeared. Monegatti and Raffi (33) noted that the MSC caused regional mass disappearances of molluscs but only a limited number of actual extinctions and that the greatest Messinian extinctions took place in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by the TG22, TG20, TG14, and TG12 glacials during the MSC. In the Zanclean, the establishment of psychrospheric water masses in the Atlantic further exacerbated this impact (41). For example, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and the blue shark (Prionace glauca) first appeared globally at the Miocene/Pliocene boundary (42) and in the Mediterranean after the MSC (43).

The MSC played a crucial role in the local extinction of shallow-water z-coral reefs, but it was probably not the main driver (40, 44). Z-corals, as tropical reef corals, are highly sensitive to temperature.

Agiadi et al., 2024

When is an extinction not an extinction? When it’s a local extinction. The “limited number of actual extinctions” occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by glacial episodes, not the MSC.

The Messinian Salinity Crisis and Zanclean Megaflood clearly comprise “a tale of upheaval and battles won and lost. Gothic tales of sweeping change, peaceful times, and then great trauma again.“

During the late Miocene, the Mediterranean Sea literally dried up and deposited a layer of halite and gypsum about a mile thick (Messinian salinity crisis). Then in the early Pliocene Epoch, the Mediterranean rapidly flooded (Zanclean megaflood), leading to the formation of the modern Mediterranean Sea. The Zanclean megaflood was a doozy.  If Gavin Schmidt’s Silurian civilization had been thriving on the Messinian  salt flats during the Late Miocene, the Zanclean megaflood would have wiped them out without a trace.  The transition from the MSC to the Zanclean megaflood marks the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene.  It left a serious mark on the stratigraphic record.

Some reconstructions of the Zanclean megaflood suggest that sea level in the Mediterranean could have risen at a rate of 10 meters per day during the peak flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin.

Now, that’s what I call climate change!

“History’s Greatest Sea is Dying”… Because Gratuitous Reference to Climate Change

The MSC caused the deposition of a thick layer of evaporites (salt, gypsum, anhydrite, etc.) across the Mediterranean basin:

However, this is not an extinction story, much less a mass extinction story. We can chalk this up to a combination of good science and bad science journalism.

References

Bowman, Steven. (2011). “Regional seismic interpretation of the hydrocarbon prospectivity of offshore Syria”. GeoArabia. 16.

Konstantina Agiadi et al., Late Miocene transformation of Mediterranean Sea biodiversity. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp1134 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp1134

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September 27, 2024 at 04:03PM

By Paul Homewood

h/t Paul Kolk

As with EVs, people are voting with their feet:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/09/27/heat-pump-sales-plummet-almost-50pc-europe/

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September 27, 2024 at 03:32PM

 British companies are paying the highest electricity prices of anywhere in the developed world, official data has shown.

The cost of power for industrial businesses has jumped 124pc in just five years, according to the Government’s figures, catapulting the UK to the top of international league tables.

It is now about 50pc more expensive than in Germany and France, and four times as expensive as in the US.

The figures will fuel concerns about the future of UK industry amid warnings that high energy prices are crippling domestic manufacturers.

Read more here:

Britain paying highest electricity prices in the world | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (wordpress.com)

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September 27, 2024 at 03:04PM

Modern jet stream patterns in Europe can be described as natural variation, based on this research. A new study says ‘Northern and southern summer EU JSL [Jet Stream Latitude] excursions thus induce a dipole between BRIT [British Isles] and NEMED [N. East Mediterranean] summer weather that is reflected not only in a variety of climate variables (Fig. 1) but also in vegetation productivity’. The article calls it a seesaw pattern.
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ScienceDaily Summary: Tree-ring data reveal that periodic shifts in strong winds high above the Earth’s surface have driven opposite climates in different parts of Europe for the past 700 years and likely much longer, resulting in contrasting patterns in weather, agricultural and societal extremes.
. . .
During her summer travels to her native Belgium, University of Arizona professor Valerie Trouet noticed something that turned casual curiosity into a major scientific discovery: When the sun hid behind an overcast sky and people around her put on sweaters instead of summer clothes, the weather tended to be warm and dry in Italy, Greece and the Balkans, popular summer escapes for tourists from the cooler climates of central and northern Europe.

At U of A’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Trouet studies tree-rings to gather clues about what past climates were like, reading wavy, wooden lines like a linguist might decipher an ancient text.

What if, she mused, the key to understanding the capricious summers in Europe could be hidden in trees, silent witnesses to centuries of warm and cold, sunshine, rain and snow?
. . .
Jet streams are concentrated bands of wind in the upper atmosphere that travel around the globe in the northern and southern hemispheres. Their exact locations are not fixed; in response to changes in the position and intensity of high- and low-pressure weather systems, they may shift north or south or change their course, resembling a swiftly running stream at some times, and a slow, meandering river at others.

The jet stream, it turns out, largely determines summer climate in Europe, and it does so in a seesaw-type pattern that climate researchers call a “dipole.”

“When the jet stream is in an extreme northern position, we get cooler and wetter conditions over the British Isles and warmer and drier conditions over the Mediterranean and the Balkans,” explained study co-author Ellie Broadman. “This is related to the climate conditions we are witnessing right now, such as catastrophic flooding in central Europe.”

Hotter conditions over the Balkans cause more moisture than normal to evaporate from the Mediterranean Sea and rain down further north.

Conversely, when the jet stream migrates further south, it drags warmer and drier air over the British Isles and pushes cooler temperatures and more moisture toward southeastern Europe.

Measurements of the jet stream have only been around since the late 1940s, Trouet said. By using tree-ring samples from across Europe as proxies for temperature, the research team was able to reconstruct jet stream variation over the past 700 years.

Each year, trees add a ring consisting of less dense wood in the spring and denser wood in the summer. By analyzing tree rings under the microscope, dendrochronologists can compile an archive of past climates.

“We link tiny, subcellular cell wall features in the wood to atmospheric winds that weave through the atmosphere many miles above the Earth, which is fascinating,” Trouet said.

Remarkably, the team found past patterns of the jet stream reflected on a societal level, recorded in historic documents.

“Europe has a long history of writing things down,” Trouet said. “For example, there were monks in Ireland who started recording storms that happened in the 600s, the early Middle Ages, and you have centuries-long records of grape harvests, grain prices and epidemics.”

By comparing historical records to the jet stream reconstruction, Trouet’s team discovered that the climate dipole created by the jet stream has influenced European society for the past 700 years and likely much longer.

“Epidemics happened more frequently in the British Isles when the jet stream was further north,” Trouet said. “Because summers were wet and cold, people stayed indoors, and the conditions were more conducive to spreading diseases.”

From 1348 to 1350, the plague, known as the Black Death, raged in Ireland. At that time, the jet stream was in an extreme, far-north position over Europe.

The findings provide critical data to improve climate models that researchers rely on to predict future climate, Broadman said. Much research has focused on how the jet stream is affected as a result of global warming.

“It’s hard to do that if you only have 60 years’ worth of data, which is why a reconstruction going back 700 years is very useful,” she said. “It allows you to actually compare the past to what’s been happening since we started putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.”

Full article here.
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Image: Forecaster highlights the jet stream over the UK [credit: BBC]

Study: Jet stream controls on European climate and agriculture since 1300 CE

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September 27, 2024 at 01:20PM