Earth could plunge into sudden ice age

[Sirius]

Experts: ‘Big Freeze’ about 12,800 years ago happened within months (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34242705/ns/technology_and_science-science/)


Oh please oh please, this is what I want for Christmas :p

[lycanox]

Meh, such event is so cold, you will be wishing for a super volcano to erupt in the neighborhood around new year to stay warm.

On the other hand, its been a while since we had an elfstedentocht.

[PanamaGuy]

o no, " The day After Tomorrow" is coming..

[Smoke]

Oh god... I'd rather not be in Canada for that.

[iulian28ti]

Let's hope there will be music.
Get it ?

[Mezurashi]

for everyone who is still busily shoving their head up their ass ...

Earth has been in a 3 Million Year Long Ice Age.

in the Billions of years Earth has existed there is Tonnes of evidence to suggest that the NORMAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURES WORLDWIDE were 5 - 10 degrees Centigrade Warmer.

jesus fucking christ ... figure it out ...

[TC]

The coal beds in northern Norway and fossil plant remains along the Arctic coast suggest several ice free periods on this planet. So obviously its been warmer, and long enough to generate forest and fauna that thrive in a temperature range that would otherwise exist within 30th latitudes.

It would take an unimaginable amount of fresh water influx to shut down the gulf stream, and at present there is no existing reservoir anywhere near large enough to produce that effect. Nor would the slower melt process of Arctic ice have the ability to cut the salinity enough to do this.

[one14am]

12,800 years ago the solar system would have been going through the galactic plane. Just as we are now doing or about to. Only it would have been traveling through it in the other direction as we are doing presently. Not sure if direction matters, but the mere fact that we are going through a place in space that seems to portend some anomalous activity we might want to take notice. Our sine wave is approximately 26 thousand years. Every 13 thousand we pass through the galactic plane. It has gone on for quite some time and the earth is still here. However, our history is not quite clear on what happens each time. Other societies have made note of this moment so it may behoove us to look into this matter a bit closer.

Just sayin.

It is doubtful that it is the end of the days, the world, or humanity, but the wave we pass through may rock our boat.

What's in your earth quake preparedness kit?

[TC]

The Danish-led North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) extracted more than 3 kilometers of ice, providing climatic and atmospheric information for the past 125,000 years. The core is particularly important because it captures the onset of the last ice age, approximatley 115,000 years ago.

This current interglacial period (Holocene) is something around 10000 to 12000 years old +- and on the average these periods last around 20000 years. ( given the core evidence of past cycles) And if this data is correct, then we have not reached the end of this warming event...facts would show another 6 to 8 thousand years remaining.

We have enough information to give a clear picture of the past 400,000 years of 4 ice ages cycles. And that scale shows the repetitive events as being more or less the same time sequence between each one.

[Blu-ray]

o no, " The day After Tomorrow" is coming..

I love that movie.

[PanamaGuy]

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to global warming/cooling. But I doubt anything will affect us in our lifetime anyways

[alpha]

The Danish-led North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) extracted more than 3 kilometers of ice, providing climatic and atmospheric information for the past 125,000 years. The core is particularly important because it captures the onset of the last ice age, approximatley 115,000 years ago.

This current interglacial period (Holocene) is something around 10000 to 12000 years old +- and on the average these periods last around 20000 years. ( given the core evidence of past cycles) And if this data is correct, then we have not reached the end of this warming event...facts would show another 6 to 8 thousand years remaining.

We have enough information to give a clear picture of the past 400,000 years of 4 ice ages cycles. And that scale shows the repetitive events as being more or less the same time sequence between each one.

surely it's not that cut & dried Shortround?

you can't say this warming period would mean another 6,000-8,000 years for sure. You would have to go back millions of years to see every example of warming and cooling to see if it is that uniform?

judging by the current average global temperature the steady warming in the last 30 years has stopped dramatically. It could be a short blip but considering the rest of the solar system and the Sun itself there are major changes afoot. No?

[HorrorReporter]

we have a mere average of 70 years on earth for a typical life.. Earth's lifespan has been millions of years..
Just as our lives go through both good and bad, wrinkles and problems, so does earth.

And yes, there WILL BE ICE AGES in the future.

[TC]

surely it's not that cut & dried Shortround?

you can't say this warming period would mean another 6,000-8,000 years for sure. You would have to go back millions of years to see every example of warming and cooling to see if it is that uniform?

judging by the current average global temperature the steady warming in the last 30 years has stopped dramatically. It could be a short blip but considering the rest of the solar system and the Sun itself there are major changes afoot. No?

No its never cut to the letter, there are fluctuations that can run 100 to 300 years, as seen during the middle ages. But for averages we have some solid science, ( you have seen the charts) and the last 4 glacial periods have run about 100,000 years and the interglacial warming periods around 20,000.

And without a massive influx of fresh water to counter the salinity counts within the Gulf stream system, or a vary large volcanic outburst, I would lean towards this current period going on for some time to come, even with the short term dips that are common.

Tree ring records suggest 50 to 100 year periods of both cold and drought during the past 500 years, and in some cases a prolonged winter season right into June during the 18th century.

As you well know, we have no models that can compose data to the finite degree that nature itself has produced, the variables are to vast and to little is known to provide a reliable scenario for future climate, even the local weather prognosis you see on TV losses about 25% a day in probability due to wind change and frontal system collapse.

[lazserus]

in the Billions of years Earth has existed there is Tonnes of evidence to suggest that the NORMAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURES WORLDWIDE were 5 - 10 degrees Centigrade Warmer.
I think you may be pushing the extreme here. On average, at least from what I've learned, the global temperature has been roughly 2-4 degrees centigrade warmer. Nowhere near 10 degrees centigrade, unless you're considering pre-organic periods in the first few million years of Earth's formation.

I appreciate your position, but when you push the envelope you perpetuate fiction related to history. If I recall correctly the average temperature of the Earth over its organic history has been roughly 20-21 degrees centigrade. We're currently at somewhere between 18-19 degrees centigrade. We're actually living in a cooled period of the planet's history.


The coal beds in northern Norway and fossil plant remains along the Arctic coast suggest several ice free periods on this planet.

The end of the Jurassic and most of the Cretaceous periods had no ice. And I mean NO ice, including the polar regions. The major freezes experienced by this planet have been when a substantial amount of geographic real estate existed at the polar regions, mostly in the south. The first major global freeze that we are certain about occurred during the Palaeozoic when majority of Gondwanaland's geographic real estate was near the southern pole.


This current interglacial period (Holocene) is something around 10000 to 12000 years old +- and on the average these periods last around 20000 years.
Keep in mind the history of glaciations, and how they've become increasingly frequent post-Cretaceous. The Cenozoic Era is notorious for witnessing frequent glaciations. They started off as being sparse, then moved to becoming more frequent. As the eons pass we notice climate change on this planet is increasingly more frequent. Just 4,000 years ago the region of Iraq was fertile, capable of growing a number of cereals that cannot survive today there; just 6,000 years ago the Sahara region was not desert but lush grassland wherein thousands of ethnic groups lived near any one of hundreds of now-dried river systems; and 9,000 years ago the last of the species of mammoths still remained up near Alaska.


We have enough information to give a clear picture of the past 400,000 years of 4 ice ages cycles. And that scale shows the repetitive events as being more or less the same time sequence between each one.
There are a number of variations that should be taken into consideration. The core samples we investigate give us a good overall picture, but they don't provide us with the detailed information of climate dynamics. Combining those core samples with pollen fossils, tree rings, and sedimentation gives us a more detailed picture, and that picture is much more complex.


you can't say this warming period would mean another 6,000-8,000 years for sure. You would have to go back millions of years to see every example of warming and cooling to see if it is that uniform?
Looking at the broader picture, there is some uniformity with increased frequency favoring cooler climates in the last 40 million years.


No its never cut to the letter, there are fluctuations that can run 100 to 300 years, as seen during the middle ages.
This climate change is more significant than most give credence to. The Medieval Warm Period prior to A.D. 900 is a misnomer in that the mean temperature between say A.D. 400-900 matches the mean temperature during the mid-20th century. Furthermore, Right around then end of the 13th century, and leading into the 14th, temperatures began to drop so dramatically that we experienced a beif ice age. That description isn't used lightly, for the lows during the Little Ice Age were literally on par with the most recent glacial maximum some 12,000-13,000 years ago. It was not until the 1820s that temperatures began to warm significantly.

[Mezurashi]

I think you may be pushing the extreme here. On average, at least from what I've learned, the global temperature has been roughly 2-4 degrees centigrade warmer. Nowhere near 10 degrees centigrade, unless you're considering pre-organic periods in the first few million years of Earth's formation.

I appreciate your position, but when you push the envelope you perpetuate fiction related to history. If I recall correctly the average temperature of the Earth over its organic history has been roughly 20-21 degrees centigrade. We're currently at somewhere between 18-19 degrees centigrade. We're actually living in a cooled period of the planet's history.

my bad, perhaps I transposed Fahrenheit with Centigrade. however, pre-organic period were estimated to be upwards of the temp of Boiling Water ... a LOT more than 10 degrees centigrade.

also - recent stuff from the study of Historical Saurian Fossils and so on seem to support my estimates, many archaeological environmental scientists are proposing that an average world wide temp of up to 10 degrees centigrade is Not extreme. viewing the Range of Localized Averages and comparing those datasets against the Species of Fossilized Plants seems to indicate that there was a huge band of 'Hothouse' conditions on Earth throughout history - allowing for the long cycle variations in climate my 'extreme pushing of the envelope' is actually more and more the 'New Theory' based on the further refinement of Current Data.

and I've been perusing this sort of info for over a decade now ... call it a weird hobby.

there is plenty of peer reviewed studies out there on this topic, I won't link you to a specific source but if you're interested a few simple Google searches should give you a few thousand pages for thought.

again, I wasn't pulling this out of my ass - but reality checks are always good ...