Re:The Coming Ice Age: A true scientific detective story (1958)
by dalke on Saturday March 21, 2015 @04:55PM
(#9244179)
The hypothesis is that the geographical North Pole was in the Atlantic 1 million years ago, and rapidly shifted to where it is now.
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.
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.