Charles (Chuck) Bryant

And they have emerged with four main hypotheses.

The one that has the most traction we're going to start with is the melt water interrupting thermohaline circulation hypothesis.

And that sounds very sort of like sciencey and nerdy and like, guys, I hope you explain this, but it's really very simple.

It is.

It's that a bunch of water disturbed the cycle of the warming cycle of the ocean very, very quickly.

That's right.

All right.

So park that in your in your brain and then understand that North America at the time had this huge 700 mile by 200 mile lake called Lake Agassiz, I guess.

Sure.

Agassiz, if you're an Andre Agassiz fan.

Yeah.

It developed as the Laurentide Ice Sheet and extended down to the Great Plains and blocked the Great Lakes.

And all the rivers that were flowing there backed up and it formed this big natural reservoir that was 700 by 200 miles big.

And this theory holds, the meltwater theory holds,

that as that last glacial maximum warmed things up, that ice sheet retreated, the blocked passage to those Great Lakes opened up, and all of a sudden, billions and billions of gallons of freshwater make its way down to the North Atlantic.

They think a similar sort of thing happened in the Nordic region.

But you're like, all right, so that makes sense.

But was this water like super cold or something?

It was cold, but the main thing it did was desalinate that upper ocean water, right?

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me.