Onset of an ICE AGE!
How many of you have seen the movie “Ice Age” or “The Day After Tomorrow”?
If you have, then you know what an Ice Age is. But the way it occurs is not the one shown in the movies. It's not like you go to bed one night and KABOOM, you wake up to a GLACIER in front of your house the next morning!!!
So what causes an Ice Age, how long it takes to settle in, and will there be another one in near future? let's learn the science behind it.
THE REASON
We might think that it occurs when winters are too harsh and very long such that snow keeps falling and grow into Snow Mountains.
Well, it isn’t the case!
The real cause is a combination of factors that are summed up in MILANKOVITCH CYCLE
This Cycle defines the regular changes in the Earth’s tilt and orbit combine to affect which areas on Earth get more or less solar radiation. When all these factors align so the northern hemisphere gets less solar radiation in summer, ice age can be started.
In simpler words, the real onset of the Ice Age is due to the COLDER SUMMERS. It happens when the summer temperature is not high enough to melt the ice formed during the previous winter.
This way the next winters have it easy to settle new ice on the previously settled ice, and it starts getting compressed. It’s like ICE ATTRACTS ICE.
Keep it up for a couple of thousand years, and there you have it, A BRAND NEW ICE AGE!
HOW SOON AND FOR HOW LONG?
Ice Age and Interglacial periods (the periods between the ice age), forms a cycle that is around 100000 years long. It has been continuing for the last 2.6 million years.
A cycle is 90000 years of the ice age and 10000 years of the interglacial period. We currently are 6000 years into the Interglacial Period.
How do we know this? Well because the summers were getting colder for the last 6000 years.
So does this mean that in the next 4000 years or so we’ll see the next Ice Age? Well, the answer is NO. The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION has in fact contributed so much to global warming that the earth’s temperature is slowly rising at around TWO Degrees Celcius. So we have to a great extent DELAYED ( if not eliminated) the chance of the next ICE AGE.
CONSEQUENCES OF ICE AGE
The ice age sure seems an awful sight. Say goodbye to your beautiful gardens, to your long trips, and to your springs!!! Not just that, bid farewell to most of the habitable land too because everything will be covered in really thick sheets of ice!!
But perhaps it has played its own part in spreading Humans beyond the Continent of Africa. The Ice Age froze the Oceans and Seas and created passages for the early humans to walk to the other landmasses and use the untapped resources there.
Well, that’s it from my side!
