Earth will return to an Ice Age again
The Earth’s climate is always changing. Sometimes the temperature increases, sometimes it decreases. Now the planet has become warmer. However, a study has revealed that the Earth will return to an ice age in 11,000 years.
Determining the cause of the Earth’s ice ages has always been difficult. Researchers have long believed that Earth’s unusual orbit around the Sun may influence the start or end of ice ages.
New research has shown that there is a clear relationship between some of these changes in the Earth’s orbit. It is related to the Ice Age. As a result, a new way to predict future climate change on Earth has been discovered.
And if the Earth is not destroyed due to man-made disasters, the ice age will come again in 11,000 years. The Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not perfectly circular.
It is somewhat oval, which is known as ‘orbital variability’. Due to this, the Sun is not exactly in the center and is slightly displaced. As a result, the distance from the Sun to the Earth changes throughout the year.
The shape and position of the Earth’s orbit change over time. This change occurs once every 26 years and changes the direction of the Earth’s orbital axis. This is called ‘orbital precession’.
And the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation is known as ‘obliquity’. That is, the angle at which the Earth rotates on its axis. The Earth’s axial tilt is about 23.5 degrees, which causes the Earth to be slightly tilted relative to its orbit. It changes as the Earth rotates around the Sun.
These different qualities of the Earth’s relationship with the Sun create warm and cold temperature cycles. Different changes in the Earth’s orbit affect how sunlight is spread across the Earth. However, it is difficult to figure out which aspects of the Earth’s orbit contribute to this climate change.
Earth’s climate is a complex, interconnected system, where many processes work together to create change.
A lot of powerful computing power is needed to model these changes over the timescale of ice age cycles. Because these processes are very difficult to measure and model separately from each other.
He explained that the Earth’s orbital precession cycle takes 21,000 years and the obliquity cycle occurs every 41,000 years. However, scientists have not found any relationship between these two cycles. The new study by scientist Barker has been published in the journal *Science*.
Another thing is that the end of an ice age happens every 100,000 years, within a period of 800,000 years. Scientists have not found the reason for this.
Barker and his colleagues began to analyze the changes in the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the deep sea over the past 800,000 years. This information is preserved in the fossils of microscopic marine animals, foraminifera.
These changes are used to identify changes in the amount of continental ice sheets. This is an important indicator for learning about the Earth’s past ice ages.
Researchers created a detailed graph of the ice age cycle by comparing two key features of Earth’s orbit: precession and obliquity.
And then a surprising pattern was revealed. The key stages of glacial and interglacial periods align with a specific relationship between Earth’s precession and tilt. In this way, researchers found evidence of a 100,000-year cycle of ice ages.
According to scientist Barker, previous studies claimed that the timing of the onset of ice ages was largely random. However, his research says that it is determined.
That is, we now have a tool with which we can predict when an ice age will begin in the future. The Earth’s tilt is currently decreasing and will reach its lowest point in 11,000 years before the next ice age starts.
