Human emissions of carbon dioxide will defer the next Ice Age, say scientists.
The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear.Researchers used data on the Earth's orbit and other things to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one.
In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.
Are we still in an ice age?
ReplyDeleteAn ice age, or more precisely, a glacial age, is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. An ice age usually lasts for 2 million years and for 90% of the Earths lifetime, it has no ice on it at all. This means it is not normal for the Earth to have ice on it and therefore this would suggest that we are in an ice age.
Over the past 500,000 years we have gone through a number of glacial and interglacial periods of and ice age and we predict that we are in the peak of and interglacial period. We think that the Earths temperature may start to decrease rapidly as we may be coming to the end of and interglacial period, and coming back into a glacial period. An interglacial period usually lasts for 11,000 years and it is 12,000 years since the last one ended.
It is 1.8 million years since the last ice age started this means that soon we could come out of the current ice age and going back into global norm.
Daniel Kedward and Lewis Cullen..