Scientists thought a comet caused Earth’s most dramatic climate event, but findings by UK researchers suggest otherwise

ORIGIN: https://www.yourweather.co.uk/news/

Around 12,800 years ago, Earth was warming steadily out of the last ice age – and then temperatures across the northern hemisphere plummeted. What caused that sudden reversal has been debated ever since.

New analysis has challenged one of the most dramatic theories put forward to explain a sudden and severe climate shift over 12,000 years ago

In a period that occured roughly 12,900 to 11,700 years ago – called the Younger Dryas – temperatures in Greenland fell to more than 15°C below what they are today, and forests across Europe were replaced by tundra.

This, reseachers believe, lasted well over a thousand years – and it came out of nowhere, at a point when the planet had been warming relatively steadily.

The most widely accepted explanation for this involves a huge pulse of freshwater from melting North American ice sheets flooding into the ocean, disrupting circulation patterns and dragging temperatures back down. But in 2013, researchers drilling ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project pulled out something odd – an unusually sharp spike in platinum levels