Map sheds light on hothouse world (BBC) {Cretaceous warming period}

[eppur_se_muova]

This is what the world may have looked like some 80 million years ago, at the time of the dinosaurs.

The climate was very hot, the Earth's ice sheets had melted, and sea levels were 170m (558ft) higher than today.

The estimates could help researchers model the effect on the seas of long-term climate changes, an Australian-led team reports in Science.

The Cretaceous period was even warmer than in current times, with shallow seas that flooded continents.

Dr Dietmar Muller of the University of Sydney, and colleagues, reconstructed the vanished ocean basins of the Cretaceous.


***
Bye-bye, lower Mississippi valley! Bye-bye Amazon basin!

[Crunchy Frog]

1. Well hey, Florida's gone!

That's gotta count for something.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. But Maine is gone too, I think

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Is that accurate?

I thought that 80M years ago the Indian sub-continent was still floating around off Africa - the Himalaya's didn't exist becaust India had not yet collided with Asia.

Also, Australia was closer to Antarctica.

That looks like a modern map with adjustments for high water.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. The continents were definitely in different places ---

I'm assuming that somehow they distorted the map to compensate for all that, i.e. what they're showing is how the present-day Earth would look if ocean levels were where they were during the Cretaceous. I suppose that brings in some guesswork.

[cornermouse]

5. Does brown equal desert?

If so I see some major problems in our future, that is if we still have one. More dense population on the American and European continents, less room for wildlife and forest, Africa appears to come out of this in fairly good shape, but Europe is definitely in trouble. Are we supposed to take up residence on the north and south poles?

[Ediacara]

7. Brown is high elevations

This map doesn't color Greenland correctly. Almost all of the elevation of Greenland is due to glacial ice. With the ice gone, what remains is a big C-shaped island with an immense central gulf communicating with Baffin Bay to the west (The ice is so heavy, it's caused the land to sink down below sea level and it will take several tens of thousands of years for it to rebound).

[Fearless]

6. I always wanted to see red states swept beneath 200 feet of water...

Who would've thought it would entail global warming coming true.