Greenland ice sheet (east coast) [image credit: Hannes Grobe @ Wikipedia]
Of course the other question about the start of an ice age still remains.
New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth’s axis was approaching higher values, reports Phys.org.
During these times, longer and stronger summers melted the large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, propelling the Earth’s climate into a warm ‘interglacial’ state, like the one we’ve experienced over the last 11,000 years.
The study by Ph.D. candidate, Petra Bajo, and colleagues also showed that summer energy levels at the time these ‘ice-age terminations’ were triggered controlled how long it took for the ice sheets to collapse, with higher energy levels producing fast collapse.
Researchers are still trying to understand how often these periods happen and how soon we can expect another one.
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