NOOOOOOO Nomad was right!!??!! Ice Age coming..?
Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2019 7:29 pmOctober 29, 2019
Increase in Antarctic sea ice could trigger an ice age, study finds
Studying the ocean's role could help scientists understand how climate works over long time periods.
We've known for years that Earth's climate is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine: Pull one lever, and a massive chain of events starts into motion. Yet many of the steps that drive these changes have remained shrouded in uncertainty.
"One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages," said Asst. Prof. Malte Jansen, whose research at the University of Chicago seeks to discover and understand the processes that make up global climate. "We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don't quite know how or why."
In a new study, Jansen and former UChicago postdoctoral researcher Alice Marzocchi lay out how an initial change in climate could start a chain of events that leads to an ice age. Their model shows how the increase in Antarctic sea ice in a colder climate could trigger a waterfall of changes that could contribute to tipping the global climate into glacial periods.
Responsibility (or blame) for Earth's climate is shared among land, life, atmosphere and ocean. Elements move back and forth among all four in a slow dance that has kept Earth habitable for billions of years—but can change the climate as elements build up in one or more of the locations.
For example, we're currently in a break between ice ages; for the past two-and-a-half million years, glaciers have periodically covered the Earth and then retreated. Scientists, therefore, have been piecing together clues about how this process of glaciation works and how it's triggered. It's likely that slight changes to Earth's orbit led to some cooling. But that alone wouldn't do it, Jansen said. There would have had to have been massive accompanying changes in the climate system to account for the amount of cooling that followed.
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-antarctic-sea-ice-key-triggering.html
Increase in Antarctic sea ice could trigger an ice age, study finds
Studying the ocean's role could help scientists understand how climate works over long time periods.
We've known for years that Earth's climate is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine: Pull one lever, and a massive chain of events starts into motion. Yet many of the steps that drive these changes have remained shrouded in uncertainty.
"One key question in the field is still what caused the Earth to periodically cycle in and out of ice ages," said Asst. Prof. Malte Jansen, whose research at the University of Chicago seeks to discover and understand the processes that make up global climate. "We are pretty confident that the carbon balance between the atmosphere and ocean must have changed, but we don't quite know how or why."
In a new study, Jansen and former UChicago postdoctoral researcher Alice Marzocchi lay out how an initial change in climate could start a chain of events that leads to an ice age. Their model shows how the increase in Antarctic sea ice in a colder climate could trigger a waterfall of changes that could contribute to tipping the global climate into glacial periods.
Responsibility (or blame) for Earth's climate is shared among land, life, atmosphere and ocean. Elements move back and forth among all four in a slow dance that has kept Earth habitable for billions of years—but can change the climate as elements build up in one or more of the locations.
For example, we're currently in a break between ice ages; for the past two-and-a-half million years, glaciers have periodically covered the Earth and then retreated. Scientists, therefore, have been piecing together clues about how this process of glaciation works and how it's triggered. It's likely that slight changes to Earth's orbit led to some cooling. But that alone wouldn't do it, Jansen said. There would have had to have been massive accompanying changes in the climate system to account for the amount of cooling that followed.
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-antarctic-sea-ice-key-triggering.html
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