Ice Ages here and everywhere
The Milankovitch CyclesThe world is spinning around the sun.(Wow, did u know that?). Seasons come and go. Only the tropics are steadfast, more or less.
Every 100.000 years the form of the earth's racecourse varies from slightly elliptical to more circular.
Within 41.000 years the inclination of the earth's axis varies some degrees.
And the axis has a precession, too.
The coincidence of the Milankovitch Cycles with glacial and intergacial periods is good enough.
We live in a time where the earth's mean temperature (15° Celsius) allows ice ages.
But most the time, for billions and hundreds of millions of years the earth's atmosphere has been too hot for ice, even in the polar regions where forests were growing.
Only two former ice ages are known.
Gases in the atmosphere play an even more important role for the temperature. Especially carbondioxide and natural gas, methane.
Comments (22)
Forests in former times, when the earth was much warmer (and more mean).
A head can be miserable. Or other parts and places.
A wooden beam was hanging too low.
Ice-ages are cyclic true... we'll have to learn to cope with the next one.. anyone has a clue when that's due?
danke.
And the end of Mayan time.
No one can really tell. In some 10.000 years maybe. But if the greenhouse effect gets big enough this scheme could be broken through.
lemme ask .. don't u think that 10,000 instead of 10.000 would be less confusing? Kind of, we (and you) already use the period to delimate fractional values..
for instance, if you wanna write number 10 as a floating point number to 3 dps, you'd have to write 10.000 which is identical to your 10,000 (which u write as 10.000)
therefore, by the german/italian convention, a floating point 10 to 3 dps is writen just like 10,000 .. I find that very confusing.. our (well .. the brit's actually