If Peter Warlow's interpretation of the Late Glacial Maximum at the 2007 SIS Cambridge Conference has any substance to it then it follows that climate in East Asia will have been somewhat different than expected in the purely Milankovitch based consensus model. Peter Warlow (see also SIS Review 2008) placed the North Pole in the Davies Straits which gave a revised Arctic Circle. Suffice to say that a large part of Siberia was excluded – which is actually what facts on the ground might be saying. There was no ice sheet in Siberia, or anywhere east of the Urals, during the Late Glacial Maximum (roughly 30,000 to 17,000 years ago). It did extend further south in NW Europe and NE North America, a situation that tends to support the Warlow hypothesis. It is also known that humans were active in the Arctic Ocean – on the Siberian side. How much of the Arctic Ocean was navigable? For instance, could humans have paddled their way from the Yenesei river to Alaska – or even the MacKenzie river in northern Canada?
The implication is that temperatures in East Asia (China and Japan) were not as cold as Ice Age theory, and the purely Milankovitch model demands – but the real beauty of the Peter Warlow reconfiguration of the Arctic Circle is that it explains i) how large herbivores such as mammoth, bison, rhinoceros, horses, elk and so on thrived over a huge area of central Asia, and territories that are now smitten by perma-frost. ii) In addition it may explain why sea levels changed dramatically at the end of the Ice Age, not so much as a result of a melting ice sheet but becaause the earth was forced to re-establish the shape of the geoid, a reform of the oceans equilibrium.
Rather than waving a vague hand at the Electric Universe model in the hope it might prove the solar system is inherently unstable, or something like that, Peter Warlow developed and stuck faithfully to his tippe top theory, in which the earth was capable of inverting itself (like a spinning top), north becoming south (and vice versa). The tippe top theory is described in articles published in SIS Review, and in his book, The Reversing Earth (available from the SIS Book Service at this web site). The stablility of the earth is assumed – a maxim that is rarely challenged. It is locked into the uniformitarian consensus model. However, an unstable earth that is capable of moving at the Poles, as in the tippe top theory, might explain some geological oddities such as fossil trees found in regions of the Arctic where it is dark for six months of the year. How can this happen? Likewise, during the Jurassic era, much earlier within the geochronological time scale, the Arctic was even warmer and sea covered large areas of what is now dry land and equally, areas that are now submerged were not so.
Whereas Peter Warlow mellowed as he grew older and more or less abandoned the idea of major inversions during the Holocene he was actively looking for evidence of them in earlier periods – including the Ice Ages. However, the tippe top theory does not necessarily require complete inversions of the earth as minor movements of the Poles were more likely to have occurred. Indeed, some tippe top movements may even have been temporary affairs, hesitating before moving back to the position with which they began. Might this be one way of explaining the various Heinrich and Dryas events – a sudden plunge in temperatures followed by a period of uncertain climate and culminating in a rapid increase in temperature as the Poles plopped back into the position from where they began to wobble.
None of this is any skin off the nose of catastrophism, one way or the other, as far as whether the Poles can rock on their axis, shift in the manner of a tippe top, or even the possibility the earth can increase or decrease the amount of tilt in its orbit independant of any movement at the Poles. It is just an issue that can be explored rather than decried as junk science, mumbo jumbo, or any other phrase the defenders of the uniformitarian faith are liable to espouse. Obviously, some people are more brain washed by the education system than others, unable to think outside the box they feel secure within – and emboldened by group behaviour. As such this is a follow-up to the last post on In the News (30th December) – and it leads naturally into the following post, The Ice Age in East Asia.