Information AboutEemian Interglacial Era |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT EEMIAN INTERGLACIAL | |
| glaciology | |
| history of climate | |
| ice ages | |
| periods and stages in archaeology | |
| pleistocene | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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The Eemian interglacial era (known as the '''Sangamon interglacial''' in was an island due to the inundation of vast areas of Northern Europe and the West Siberian Plain . At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec , and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west — near Lubbock, Texas , instead of near Dallas, Texas , where the boundary now exists. The era quickly cooled to conditions cooler and drier than the present, and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial era had returned. Kaspar et al. (GRL, 2005) perform a comparison of a coupled GCM with reconstructed Eemian temperatures for Europe. Central Europe (north of the Alps) is found to be 1-2°C warmer than present; south of the alps conditions are 1-2°C cooler than today. The model (forced with observed GHG concentrations and Eemian orbital parameters) generally reproduces these observations, and hence they conclude that these factors are enough to explain the Eemian temperatures. SEA LEVEL Sea level at peak was probably 4-6m higher than today (references in Overpeck et al.), with much of this coming from Greenland but some likely to have come from Antarctica. Global mean sea surface temperatures are not though to have been significantly higher than holocene, hence the thermal expansion difference from today is small. IPSWICHIAN INTERGLACIAL This name is used by British Geologist s and Archaeologist s who named it after the town of Ipswich in the English county of Suffolk , where some of the deposits it created were first found. SEE ALSO REFERENCES
Richard B. Alley, Jeffrey T. Kiehl, ''Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise'', Science 311 24 March 2006. |