Word: frigidities
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Just as last week's tremors were destroying highways, buildings and lives in Southern California, an even deadlier natural disaster was advancing slowly but inexorably south from Canada into the U.S. By midweek a huge mass of frigid arctic air had practically paralyzed much of the Midwest and East. Temperatures in dozens of cities dropped to all-time lows: -22 degreesF in Pittsburgh; -25 degrees in Akron, Ohio, and Clarksburg, West Virginia; -27 degrees in Indianapolis, Indiana. Chicago schools closed because of cold weather for the first time in history, Federal Government offices shut down in Washington, and East Coast...
...that starts happening more and more often, though, it might mean that something bigger is going on. Climatologists once thought the world eased into ice ages, with average temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere falling 15 degrees over hundreds or thousands of years. During long, frigid winters and short, cool summers, snow piled up much faster than it could melt, and mile-thick sheets of ice gradually covered much of the planet's land surface. After 100,000 years or so, scientists believed, the glaciers made a dignified retreat, stayed put for about 10,000 years and then began...
...over the past several years, researchers have dug deep into Atlantic sea-floor sediments and Greenland glaciers to study the chemistry of ancient mud and ice, and they are increasingly convinced that climate change is anything but smooth. The transition from warm to frigid can come in a decade or two -- a geological snap of the fingers. Says Gerard Bond, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory: "The data have been coming out of Greenland for maybe two or three decades. But the first results were really so surprising that people weren't ready to believe them...
...unchangingly warm. About 40,000 years ago, for example, right in the middle of the last Ice Age, the world warmed briefly, forcing glaciers to retreat. And while the current interglacial period has been stably temperate, the previous one, according to at least one study, was evidently interrupted by frigid spells lasting hundreds of years. If that period was more typical than the present one, humanity's invention of agriculture, and thus civilization, may have been possible only because of a highly unusual period of stable temperature -- a fluke...
...short, while there is no reason to think the next full-fledged Ice Age is upon us, a shorter episode of frigid conditions could happen at any time. The last interglacial period was warmer than this one and also, arguably, more unstable. It is conceivable that the greenhouse effect could heat up the planet for a while but then trigger changes that could plunge the earth into a sudden chill. And for an idea of what a mini-Ice Age might be like, just imagine last week's cold wave lasting all winter, every winter -- for the next thousand years...