Research News: Ancient drought choked the U.S. Southwest for centuries - what does the future hold?

 Climate change is a reality that uneducated people struggle with, but paleoclimatologists and archaeologists have shown its effects on life. Recently, paleoclimatologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas studied a cave in a Utah desert that revealed an ancient people lived there and enjoyed fresh water and food sources. Climate change transformed it into a desert and because of global warming, that pattern is setting up again, which spells trouble for the U.S. southwest. Here's the Fascinating Findings>>>> 

(Photo:  Inside Danger Cave. Photo: Judy Fahys/Inside Climate News)

Ancient drought choked the U.S. Southwest for centuries - what does the future hold?

By Judy Fahys/InsideClimate News

Dec. 28, 2020

The ancient people of western Utah’s Danger Cave lived well. They ate freshwater fish, ducks and other small game, according to detritus they left behind. They had a lush lakeside view with cattails, bulrushes and water-loving willows adorning the marshlands. But over time, the good life became history. As heat and drought set in, the freshwater dried up, and the ancients were forced to survive by plucking tiny seeds from desert shrubs called pickleweed. Archaeologists know this from a thick layer of dusty chaff buried in the cave’s floor. 

 It might be ancient history, but science tells us that the past could also become the future. In fact, thanks to global warming, regional climate patterns linked to extended periods of heat and drought that upended prehistoric life across the Southwest thousands of years ago are setting up again now. 

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CRONKITENEWS · InsideClimate News: Ancient droughts lasted for thousands of years

“The benefit of any kind of paleoclimate data is that it tells us what nature is capable of,” said Matthew Lachniet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

 The climate risk across the Southwest is actually growing, based on Lachniet’s recent study of a different cave about 200 miles across the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and the western half of Utah. His geochemical data from Leviathan Cave in Nevada shows that drought can last 4,000 years – findings that Lachniet’s team cross-checked against paleoclimate data from the Arctic and tropical Pacific. In short, the story in the cave data suggests a worst-case scenario that could – and probably should – guide planning throughout the Southwest, home to 56 million people. 

 Lachniet’s scientific paper, released last summer in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, sprang from his work analyzing part of a rock pillar from Leviathan Cave, which is in Nevada’s Basin and Range National Monument. 

 The paleohistory that his team analyzed in the stalagmites that formed in Leviathan cover nearly the same time frame that humans first started using Danger Cave, which is now considered one of the Great Basin’s most important human history sites.

 FOR THE FULL STORY, VISIT: https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/12/28/ancient-droughts-lasted-for-thousands-of-years-research-shows/