More Than 8,000 Years Ago, It Rained in California—for 150 Years

It was a soggy state of affairs.

Coming off the recent drought, it’s hard to imagine that California once had more water then it needed. But that’s what scientists recently revealed according to a story on Popular Science.

“The uncharacteristically rainy period accompanied a climate anomaly which took place at the same time, first discovered in Greenland ice cores in 1997. The ‘8.2 ka’ event took place during the Holocene (aka the last 11,000 years or so) which was once thought to be a pretty uneventful time, climate-wise. The new findings were published recently in Scientific Reports.

“’We had just come out of the last ice age, the big ice sheets were melting back and people thought there wasn’t much going on,’ says lead author Jessica Oster, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University. ‘But in the Greenland ice core record in the 90’s, a group of researchers noticed a big negative spike.’”

“That temperature plummet in Greenland led two glacial lakes to dump melt water into the North Atlantic, which changed the way that oceans and the atmosphere circulated and made things take a turn for the stormy.”

To read more about this unusual California weather event and if it could happen again, ready the whole story here.