#glaciation

And so concludes this short and relaxing formation #paleostream! The Soom Shale is a late Ordovician lagerstätte with few fossils but often times exceptional preservation. This is one of the few places we have conodont fossils from with more than just the "teeth"

This member of the Cederberg Formation formed right after the Ordivician glaciation ended. Yet, it was still cold enough to have huge icebergs come through from melting glaciers, leaving dropstone behind (one is in the background).

Did you know the “ice age” never completely finished?

By that I mean… you know the ice sheet that grinded Canada down to bedrock? The one that sat a mile high over Boston? The one that dug out the Great Lake basins? The one that pushed deep into North America, forming massive proglacial lakes and changing the courses of river systems?

That ice sheet still exists.

Sort of.

In Inuit territory, on the great island known as Qikiqtaaluk, you can lick the last, ancient icepop left from that continent-sized ice sheet that once smothered North America like a blanket.

Known as the Barnes Ice Cap, it’s the last fragment left of the mighty Laurentide Ice Sheet. And it’s melting FAST.

It will likely outlive me- but not by much. It’s like a 20,000-year-old ice cream cone, and we’ve dropped it on the hot pavement. In our rapidly warming world, it will likely be completely gone within a century or two.

Its contribution to global sea level rise won’t be particularly significant- it’s a rounding error compared to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

But to me, it’s like some kind of impossibly ancient alabaster tortoise;

a witness of unknown epochs of history;

critically endangered;

the last living of its kind;

doomed to perch up high on its mountain, drooling, panting, feverish, baked by the sun in a carbon blanket;

until it finally expires, leaving only bare rock and gravel for a grave:

no trace left of an ice age that covered a continent.

Found here on Facebook.

Il y a une quinzaine de jours, j'étais chez mon amie Christine à Pau.

Pour fuir la canicule du moment, on fait des balades dans les Pyrénées Bigourdanes (de la région de Bigorre, donc !), ici dans la Vallée du Lutour.

Icy gothic abandoned castle❄

(made with AI)

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Оледенелый готический заброшеный замок❄

Our monthly bonus chat is live! This special episode focuses on a simple question - Why can't Hollywood make a good climate change movie? This was prompted by Christina's rewatch of The Day After Tomorrow some time ago, and as a scientist and solarpunk, she was both horrified and offended.

Join us as she gets it out of her system, and we deep-dive into this example of the representation of climate catastrophe on the silver screen!