Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Guest ?How not to connect the present with the past? by David Middleton

Alabama?s Return to the Sea
A paleontological site shows how life endured in an Alabama that was almost fully submerged?and how it could again as the ocean rises.
by Jack Tamisiea
September 8, 2021

Alabama?s Harrell Station, roughly 75 kilometers west of Montgomery and 250 kilometers inland from the Gulf of Mexico, seems like the last place someone would go to explore the ocean. But crumbling out of the dusty ground, which has been wrinkled into gullies of white chalk, are the remnants of an ancient sea. During the Late Cretaceous some 82 million years ago, high temperatures melted the polar ice caps submerging the world?s coasts. A shallow sea known as the Mississippi Embayment spilled out over the southeastern United States, blanketing much of Alabama. Harrell Station is one of the best places to glimpse this…

What is normal weather?

One doesn?t spend much time learning about climatology before coming across a marvelous sound bite: ?Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.? The catch is it?s not clear how to measure what you expect. We?re a lot better at measuring weather.

The whole topic of measuring expectations deserves its own web page, as does the problem that we humans are pretty terrible at remembering weather, even extreme weather, and sometimes even recognizing extreme weather.

One way we define ?normal? is that every ten years climatologists collect and average the previous thirty years of weather data, then release that as the ?new normals.? While that has a lot of shortcomings, and some are mentioned below, it all works out pretty well when comparing the ?current normals? to the ?current weather.? However, when new normals are released, and are different than the old…