The most recent ice age can be dated back 11,000 years ago. A mist glaciation is an event that starts from the earth’s polar region and extends all the way onto earth latitude and reshapes the face of the planet into a sheathed frozen snow or ice ball.
Recently scientists have found out the mysterious reason behind the ice age and the news is fascinating.
Here an interesting video by national geography on glaciers. Take a look.
According to the scientists:
Planetary Science Research Constantin Arnscheidt from MIT said,” there are a lot of ideas for what caused these global glaciations. Still, they all boil down to some implicit modification of solar radiation coming in.”
They said the carbon cycle present in the earth’s atmosphere back then resulted in an ice age.
After more than two years of discovering the 2.7 million years, age-old ice scientists revealed some interesting facts. After drilling into Antarctica’s ice for study, they found out that the air bubbles in 1.5 million years ancient ice proved the fact that the expected level of co2 was way too less than compared to our present time(because of global warming). This resulted in the ice age cycle shift.
Yige Zhang, a paleoclimatologist at Texas A&M University, said that the co2 levels are “amazingly low.”
Mid-Pleistocene transition:
Since 2.6 million years ago, the earth used to transit in and out of glaciation periods at a regular 40,000 years intervals. This time was known as the Pleistocene period. In the mid-Pleistocene period, about 1 million years ago, the ice age cycles went from occurring between 40,000 years to 1 million years.
The main factor for the earth to move in and out of these ice ages is the change in earth’s orbit called “Milankovitch cycles.” but nothing changed in orbital patterns 1 million years ago that would have driven the flip. So they say there is no ice age in the last 100,000 million years.
CO2 levels:
Some scientists suspect that the levels of co2 were higher in 40,000 years, eventually declining in level and cooled the planet, causing the earth for a transition ice age and freezing it every 100,000 years.
From the recent study of ancient ice, about 1.5 million years ago stated that the co2 levels were swinging between 204 and 289 ppm. Compared to co2 levels of the present day, which is 407 ppm, state that global warming can gradually hit the tipping point, triggering the temperature shift that affects the climate of the northern hemisphere.
“This does not necessarily mean that a similar response would happen in the future with increasing CO2 levels since the boundary conditions are different from the ice age,” said Professor Gerrit Lohmann.
