Latest Ice ages Stories

North Pacific circulation radically changed by past post-glacial warmingToward the end of the last ice age, a major reorganization took place in the current system of the North Pacific with far-reaching implications for climate, according to a new study published in the July 9, 2010, issue of Science by an international team of scientists from Japan, Hawaii, and Belgium.Earth's climate is regulated largely by the world ocean's density-driven circulation, which brings warm surface water to the...

A chain of past natural events may hold lessons for the futureScientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization. In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south. Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth's northern half. But how did...

CO2 levels explain why temperatures in tropical and arctic waters have risen and fallen together for the past 2.7 million yearsIncreasingly, the Earth's climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Niño, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.Now, a research team led by Brown University has established that the climate in the tropics over at least the last 2.7 million...

Less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history.That's the conclusion of an international group of researchers, who have compiled the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.For decades, scientists have strived to collect sediment cores from the difficult-to-access Arctic Ocean floor, to discover what the Arctic was like in the past. Their most recent goal: to bring a long-term perspective to the ice loss we see today.Now, in an upcoming issue of Quarternary...

Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository "“ something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern...

For insight into what can happen when the Earth's carbon cycle is altered -- a cause and consequence of climate change -- scientists can look to an event that occurred some 720 million years ago.New data from a Princeton University-led team of geologists suggest that an episode called "snowball Earth," which may have covered the continents and oceans in a thick sheet of ice, produced a dramatic change in the carbon cycle. This change in the carbon cycle, in turn, may have triggered...

Researchers here are hopeful that the new core they drilled through an ice field on the Antarctic Peninsula will contain ice dating back into the last ice age.  If so, that record should give new insight into past global climate changes.The expedition in early winter to the Bruce Plateau, an ice field straddling a narrow ridge on the northernmost tongue of the southernmost continent, yielded a core that was 445.6 meters (1,462 feet) long, the longest yet recovered from that region of...

In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of the Earth's orbital cycle to changes in the Earth's climate. The finding is reported in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.Lisiecki performed her analysis of climate by examining ocean sediment cores. These cores come from 57 locations around the world. By analyzing sediments, scientists are able to chart the Earth's...

Climate scientists from all over the globe are now able to test their climate models under extreme conditions thanks to Professor Minik Rosing, University of CopenhagenIn 1972, the late, world famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleague George Mullen formulated "The faint early sun paradox. " The paradox consisted in that the earth's climate has been fairly constant during almost four of the four and a half billion years that the planet has been in existence, and this despite the...

Scientists find signs of 'snowball Earth' amidst early animal evolutionGeologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time.Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work this week in the journal Science. The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada...