Rapid Formation of Peat Bogs

From National Science Foundation comes a Russian/USA study of Peat Bogs. (Hat tip to Crumb Trail) From NSF: bq. Massive Siberian peat bogs, widely known as the permanently frozen home of untold kilometers of moss and uncountable hordes of mosquitoes, also are huge repositories for gases that are thought to play an important role in the Earth's climate balance, according to newly published research by a team of U.S. and Russian scientists in the Jan. 16 edition of the journal Science. Those gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are known to trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, but the enormous amounts of the gases contained in the bogs haven't previously been accounted for in climate-change models. (Emphasis mine) bq. The new research, said Laurence Smith, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a primary author on the paper, could help to refine those materials. Smith's work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. bq. A key finding of the research, unrelated to modern climate change, is that the bogs themselves came into being suddenly about 11,500 to 9,000 years ago-much earlier than previously thought - and expanded very rapidly to fill the niche they now occupy. Their appearance coincides with an abrupt and well- documented spike in the amount of atmospheric methane recorded in ancient climate records. The finding counters previously held views that the bogs were largely unchanged-and unchanging-over millennia. The rapid appearance of the bogs provides strong evidence that this is not the case. (Emphasis mine again) From Crumb Trail: bq. The more we learn the less we know since so much of what we thought we knew was wrong. I find this comforting, a demonstration of the rich harvests still awaiting diligent searchers and an increasingly credible account of natural systems to replace the crude cartoon versions we have thus far. Ecosystems are not created or destroyed - they are supple and fluid and shift as the global climate changes over the years. The fact that the bogs came into existence much earlier than previously thought and there genesis was much faster points to a sudden change in climate at that time. Must have been those pesky Hominid ancestors of ours. After all, 15K BC puts us at the Lascaux Cave Paintings, 10K BC puts us at Neolithic culture - the bow and arrow, the first agricultural villages, domestication of Dog and Reindeer and the earliest Pottery. They were burning too much fuel and didn't have a sense of deep ecology that is needed to preserve the environment and they... they... suffered a Global Bog Event! See??? Now let me change my computer model to show this more clearly and we can write a paper for the next United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference. Last December it was in Milan - mmmmm Christmas in Italy, I could use a nice trip... Bunch of twits