Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
The Continuing Mysteries of the Ice Ages
Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.
Understanding the ice age cycles that have occurred on the Earth during the past million years is — without question — one of the great scientific puzzles of all time.
By ‘great’ I mean not only the importance for many current environmental issues, like climate change and the massive greenhouse gas increases, but great in the sense that solving the mysteries of their occurrence requires breakthroughs from so many different fields of science.
I did post-graduate research on ice ages with a climatologist, Barry Saltzman, who was a co-discoverer of chaos (with Ed Lorenz) and who spent much of his later career on ice age science. I remember marveling with him over the almost ridiculous number of disciplines ice-age science involves: geology, glaciology, climatology, atmospheric physics and chemistry, oceanography, astronomy, geochemistry, biology, geomagnetism, meteorology, nonlinear mathematics and probably other fields I’m not listing!
