The ice age is typically considered an age of golden times. In the Timaeus, Plato talks of the mythical island of Atlantis, which was swallowed up by the sea in a “single day and night of misfortune” in c about 11000 years ago which matches with the time ice age is considered to have ended.
Following article goes in length on this cyclical theory, most concretely defined in Hindu's yugas cycle and provides several geological, archaeological and historical evidence to back the research presented.
http://bibhudev.blogspot.in/2012/07/end-of-kali-yuga-in-2025...
If someone had told me this article had only been published in the last couple of years, it would not have been implausible.
The basic idea that melting of of the polar ice caps could result in drastically colder weather in Europe and the northeastern part of America not really new to me, but the idea that this might at the same time mean much warmer weather around the arctic circle is certainly fascinating.
If someone presented that scenario now, it would be considered very implausible, because it goes against the evidence and mathematical models of the physics of the Earth.
Pollen studies carried out within 10 years of the publication of the hypothesis shows that the Arctic was colder during glaciation. See https://books.google.com/books?id=N0mzl3c6g6kC&lpg=PA83&ots=... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17754671 and https://books.google.com/books?id=8OWQTJP8oFkC&lpg=PA230&ots... , which say the evidence was enough to make the hypothesis implausible.
This research was done after the model was published. While it was viable in the 1950s, it no longer fits the evidence.
Is the article talking about the geographic poles (the rotational axis of earth) or the magnetic poles? Because I think I remember reading that the magnetic poles of earth have been moving around quite a bit over time, that the magnetic poles are (slowly) moving today at a speed that scientists can measure, and that at some point, the magnetic north pole was rather close to the rotational south pole. (Although I do not know if the location of the magnetic poles has any impact on climate.)
The problem with the hypothesis is it doesn't answer the question (quoting from page 7):
> What started off the first Ice Age cycle?
> “We know that during the past million years, the world has swung back and forth between ice ages and weather like today’s,” Ewing and Donn told me. “Before then, the whole earth was much warmer. There were no zones of extreme heat or cold; palms and magnolias grew in Greenland, and coral around Iceland; subtropical plants thrived within eleven degrees of the North Pole. Why didn’t the Arctic Ocean-glacier ‘thermostat’ work then? What suddenly turned it on one million years ago?
(We now know there have been multiple periods of glaciation. We are now in the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, which started 2.5 million years ago. The previous, the Karoo Ice Age, was 360–260 million years ago.)
It only explains why there are cycles, but if the planetary conditions were the same 3 million years ago, and there were no cycles, then the hypothesis would be in error.
Remember, in the 1950s the new theory of plate tectonics was only just coming into wide acceptance. The quote from the Harper's piece assumes that the crust moves a lot faster than the evidence found though the successive decades of research.
It also explains why both global warming and impending ice age are linked.
This doesn't deny, of course, that mankind hasn't done his bit to accelerate the natural ebbs and flows of the global climate and the pace at which they are occurring.