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As little as 6,000 years ago, the vast Sahara Desert was covered in grassland that received plenty of rainfall, but shifts in the world's weather patterns abruptly transformed the vegetated region into some of the driest land on Earth. A Texas A&M university researcher is trying to uncover the clues responsible for this enormous climate transformation – and the findings could lead to better rainfall predictions worldwide.
Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, along with colleague William Boos of Yale University, have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.
The two researchers have looked into precipitation patterns of the Holocene era and compared them with present-day movements of the intertropical convergence zone, a large region of intense tropical rainfall. Using computer models and other data, the researchers found links to rainfall patterns thousands of years ago.
"The framework we developed helps us understand why the heaviest tropical rain belts set up where they do," Korty explains.
"Tropical rain belts are tied to what happens elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation, but it won't predict changes elsewhere directly, as the chain of events is very complex. But it is a step toward that goal."
(Score: 0, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:15AM
Two possibilities:
One: It was Tropical because God had not yet divided the light from the dark, on the first Day, which was already quite light or he couldn't have seen what he was doing . . .(actually, that explains a lot, even jmorris!). This is the Young Earth Moron explanation. (Did you just see aristarchus mock religion? Did you?)
Or Two: The Sahara was tropical because it lay between the two tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which, by the way, it still does? So what is at issue here? (No, I did not RTFA! Nobody else does, why should I? Eh? I am Tropical to you! Ha Ha! )
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @05:11AM
Because nobody makes an ass of themselves like you do. Perhaps a step in the right direction would be for you to actually read the comments you respond to like most other folks on this site do.
(Score: 0, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday December 03 2016, @06:13AM
Umm. Frost Piss? There were no comments to respond to! What are you talking about? I would really like to understand you, AC, but you are making it most difficult. All I can say now is that I hope a male camel finds your mother in a compromised position.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:51PM
and poops on her? :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hyperturtle on Saturday December 03 2016, @02:19PM
Oh, I was told that the deser itself intelligently created, and was located between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, because the chimeric (I'm trying to tie in the Capricorn here without getting goofy with astrology to explain the latter) dinosaur overlords (whose rule ended about 6001 years ago in a sudden and quite unexpected flash of light from the sky)--were actually serious about farming and smoking the good parts of the plants (hence the former).
They drained the swamps, used synthetic fertilizers (having not found any mammals yet to cover the land in BS) planted cash crops like hemp and poppies, and ended up turing that area into an arid, cancer causing (tobacco was a cash crop, too) desert of only junk food oasises. The desserts of the deserts, they called it. Very profitable to addict your customers; the problem was that the farmers were users as well.
So, it is of no surprise when then they all got too big and fat. And so they died when they were spaced out and something came out of space. [*documented in the historical allegory known as Airplane] The big thing of light was probably related two of these things: a fungal based cash crop later determined to be manna from the heavens, and an alien spaceship suffering from a hard landing which was called a space arc, from how it was perceived to enter and how it was later documented when that flood from the impact that drained what was left of the Sahara finished the swamps for good, leaving no ruling party from the dinosaurs left to continue with the status quo.
That the arc itself released a bunch of mated pairs of mammals upon crash landing and sealed their fate; the animals ate what was left in all of the convenience stores, grazed the grasslands to nothing and them moved out of Africa to populate the rest of the world, leaving the dinosaurs with just cartons of cigarettes and twinkies. This is enough for some folks, we can see how evolution has selected for this.
To lend credence to this, note that a similar modern-day example can be seen in places like Texas--big, filled with oil, food deserts in real deserts they call suburbia, and a few folks that too big and fat that live throughout the deserts. I am not sure about the arc having a modern day precedent there, but they do have walmart, where the progeny of such historical relics like those overly sized specimens can still be found grazing today; twinkies are known to have a long shelf life.
Also, none of this is wrong because we can't prove a falsehood so I cannot be proven false. Please don't encourage me to think otherwise, because I am happy living in my fantasy world where dinosaurs farmed psychedelics before space mammals landed and gave us steaks.