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Quote by Fred Pearce

“We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated. Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, “Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China.”

Quote by Fred Pearce

Book:The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation
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The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

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Fred Pearce

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“It was Cesare Emiliani who first drew serious attention to the possibility of post-glacial superfloods. In a paper published in Science magazine in 1975, he and a group of colleagues presented startling evidence from deep-sea cores from the north-eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico. The evidence revealed 'a 2.4 per cent isotopic anomaly between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago', which the authors correctly interpreted as having been caused by 'the occurrence of major flooding of ice meltwater into the Gulf of Mexico ... centring at about 11,600 years before the present'.”

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“There is indeed compelling evidence of a series of massive glacial surges at the end of the last Ice Age. These correlate with meltwater pulses and peaks of sea-level rise, recorded, for example, in 'drowned' reefs of Acropora palmata from the Caribbean-Atlantic region near the island of Barbados. Acropora is an efficient tracker of rising sea-level because it is a light-loving coral that dies at depths greater than about 10 meters. The Barbados reefs were drowned three times at the end of the last Ice Age -- at approximately 14,000, 11,000 and 8000 years ago -- and so suddenly and deeply on each occasion that they now form three distinct steps, one for each flooding peak (rather than having crept towards shallower water as would have been the case with more gradual sea-level rises).”

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