100,000 year ice age cycle linked to orbital periods and sea ice

Watts Up With That?

From BROWN UNIVERSITY

Earth’s orbital variations and sea ice synch glacial periods

The Southern Hemisphere has a higher capacity to grow sea ice than the Northern Hemisphere, where continents block growth. New research shows that the expansion of Southern Hemisphere sea ice during certain periods in Earth’s orbital cycles can control the pace of the planet’s ice ages. CREDITJung-Eun Lee / Brown University

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet’s higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and why the cycle was different before a million years ago.

Using a set of computer simulations, the researchers show that two periodic variations in Earth’s orbit combine…

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