Climate changes dramatically all the time! Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and so on.
"In the not very distant past, the Arabian Peninsula was likely a savannah, with wolves, lions and leopards.
That’s the conclusion from new research into ancient rainfall patterns in Arabia going back thousands of years, which reveals the region was much wetter than today. ...
Today, Arabia is mostly covered in very arid desert. But the new palaeo-climate analysis ... shows that the past 2,000 years were much wetter, and the region was once a vegetated savannah. ...
Researchers studied Arabia’s ancient climate using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to extract sediment cores from deep-sea brine pools nearly 2km beneath the surface in the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea. ...
The ancient, vegetated savannah of Arabia persisted until as recently as 200 years ago [or about the end of the Little Ice Ag], when the rainfall was double what it is today. ..."
From the abstract:
"... Fortuitously, we discovered an anoxic deep-sea brine pool sited close enough to shore to chronicle floods, yet be otherwise undisturbed by animals. Cores retrieved from the pool delivered a 1600-year rainfall record. We merge these core-layer histories with modern rainfall statistics, satellite observations, and simulations to deliver a high-resolution quantitative Late Holocene hydroclimate record for Arabia.
We find that the modern era is 2.5 times drier than the last 1.6 thousand years.
The Little Ice Age stands out as particularly wet. That period experienced a fivefold increase in rainfall intensity compared to today. Though hyperarid now, the flood layers demonstrate that climate shifts can generate weather conditions unwitnessed in the modern era. Such long-range insight is crucial for framing uncertainties surrounding future hydroclimate forecasts."
Fig. 2. Depositional setting of the NEOM brine pool.
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