Word: milankovitch
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...reason that sea levels may have been higher 81,000 years ago than today is that the Earth was receiving stronger solar radiation at that time. That would fit into what's known as the Milankovitch theory of ice-age cycles, which posits that the Earth's orbit around the sun and the planet's axial tilt wobble periodically, increasing or decreasing the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet's surface. "The sea-level high may be considered an exception to the 100,000-year cycle, in which high summer sunlight caused the ice sheets to melt," writes...
...gone to Beijing's Tsinghua University, the "MIT of China," to make his half-apocalyptic, half-optimistic pitch about climate change. In his nerdy professor style and referring to "Milankovitch cycles" and the "albedo effect" as well as melting glaciers and rising seas, Chu methodically explained that the science is clear, that we're boiling the planet - but also that science can save us, that we can innovate our way to sustainability. He acknowledged that the developed nations that made the mess can't tell the developing world not to develop, but he also warned that China is on track...
...much of the Northern Hemisphere had once been covered by thick sheets of ice was both new and highly controversial. Within a few decades, though, most scientists were convinced and began looking for explanations. Several suggested that astronomical cycles were involved, and by the 1930s the Yugoslav astronomer Milutin Milankovitch had constructed a coherent theory. The ice ages, he argued, were triggered by changes in the shape of the earth's slightly oval orbit around the sun and in the planet's axis of rotation. Studies of the chemical composition of ocean-floor sediments, which depend on climate conditions when...
According to Milankovitch cycles, an ice age could start sometime within the next 1,000 or 2,000 years. But geophysicists have realized for years that while the cycles are real, and influence climate, they alone cannot explain ice ages. For one thing, Milankovitch's timing of glaciation may be broadly correct, but major glacial episodes happen when his cycles call for minor ones, and vice versa...
...explained by a link between ice ages and changes both in the earth's attitude and in its orbit around the sun. That concept was championed by Germany's Alfred Wegener (best known for his ideas about continental drift) and later refined by Yugoslav Mathematician Milutin Milankovitch, for whom the theory is now named. Last year three scientists -James Hays of Columbia, John Imbrie of Brown University and Nicholas Shackleton of Cambridge University in England-published the strongest evidence yet that Milankovitch was right. Analyzing cores of sediments taken from beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean...
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