The Next Ice Age

So there's a plausible hypothesis about how the last ice age began.

 

Essentially, when India crashed into Asia, the rising Himalayas (still rising) disrupted the monsoon weather that previously swooped north to rain all over central Asia were blocked and forced to higher elevation, causing rains to become snows. As the mountains are particularly tall, they got glaciers, which flowed down both sides, including the Tibetan Plateau which ended up with ice sheet. Ice sheet reflects light, making it even colder there and more fell until Glaciers were rolling down off the plateau and mountains in all directions. Overall cold also affected mountains on other continents and you get glaciers in other parts of asia, Europe, North and South America, starting in the high and cold places but eventually making their own weather. All that ice came from somewhere so sea levels fell 80 meters. That's nearly 300 feet. The North Sea is 300 feet deep. It was dry during the ice age, thanks to a huge glacier at the north from Scotland to Norway and no English Channel. That came later. You could walk from Yorkshire to Norway, and people did. Oil crews still find stone age artifacts on the sea bottom there.

Similarly, we know that the north American ice sheet was centered in Canada and flowed down to the South and East as well as north. This sheet was two miles thick and generated its own weather. There is known evidence of glaciers reaching into Texas and the Florida Panhandle, at their greatest extent. It is hypothesized that free (non-frozen) water on the Arctic Ocean allowed for wet summer storms to snow in the northern Rockies where it is typically an dry cold desert. Accumulating snow would eventually turn into a glacier, which then flows down. A big enough glacier eventually changes the surface temperatures.

And this is where things get amusing. You have to have WARMING to get the arctic ocean to melt enough to put water into the cold DRY artic winds, which gets snow on those Rocky Mountains in Northern Canada which are cold and bone dry, for now. And since we've already gotten prior ice ages over the last 3 million years, the last of which only ended (officially) 10,000 years ago, we are about due for the next one to start. And sea levels rose 80 meters. That is about 300 feet. This also means that in the next ice age, sea levels will SINK 80 meters, eventually. Venice won't be flooded anymore. All those nice docks in Miami will be high and dry. The north Sea will shrink. Hudson Bay will lose a lot of its size. Ice is also denser than land, than rock, so the weight of the glaciers advancing will start pressing down again, and continents work by equilibrium. We may see some earthquakes as they bend the underlying basement rock. Also, it could set off volcanoes as the stresses will shift over certain magma chambers. Nevada has a number of technically active volcanoes though they are commonly thought to be dormant by non-Geologists. Belize will turn into a swamp. All those coastal cities will find they have to rebuild their docks down on the new mudflats. And even that is kinda risky, since earthquakes tend to lift coastlines. Continental rock is lighter, less dense, than sea floor rock. In the prior ice age, the Pleistocene, some of those bigger shelves had a huge impact on global climate, namely by shutting off the Arctic current through the Bering Strait because it wasn't a straight anymore. The land bridge was hundreds of miles across. With no cold water input into the North Pacific, there was no regulating sea surface temps in the Western USA, California for example, so we got Hurricanes all the way to Oregon, not just petering out before reaching San Diego like now. That also meant no fog. However, rainfall levels were 125 inches a year. That's 3-10x what we have now, and the hurricanes also spawned off huge thunderstorms into the Southwest, which provided water to the forests of juniper and topped up the perched aquifers all over the desert, filled the shallow lakes, fed the streams and rivers meandering through Nevada, which was an important stopover point for migrating birds and mammoths, mastodons, and those camels you currently find in Asia and the Sahara. Both species are from the Americas, as camellids evolved in South America and spread across the land bridge to the rest of the world. Same with sheep. The land bridge was really important.

 

It is also important to remember that while glaciers are forming, and meltwaters sometimes flow down the far side into deserts, revitalizing them (Owens River Valley), they also change local and regional climate by their presence. Liquid arctic ocean water makes glaciers in the Rockies. Fallen sea levels ends some currents, and changes the origin of rain waters and timing. Hurricanes are summer events. Hurricanes flowing up the California coastline and dumping 125 inches of rain? That's a big change from today, but it was like that for 3 million years before people. During the ice age that was a typical weather pattern. When the ice age comes back, it will return. Real science rarely gets certainty, but the patterns for ice ages and retreats is well established, heavily studied by reputable scientists without political agenda, and documented extensively for the last few centuries. And its fascinating stuff. The study of ice ages is called Glaciology. It is NOT the same thing as Climate Religion, which gets all the press and money. Glaciologists have seen a lot of retreats, where a glacier slows its movement and melts a lot, but this is not that unusual. In the Little Ice Age, from 1150-1850, glaciers advanced a meter a day until one knocked over a church in Switzerland. The whole thing is well documented by the local priest who tried everything to save their chapel. Monks in the Medieval Warm Period have diaries and budget ledgers detailing the fish catch of Cod from Iceland in 800 AD, listing them by barrel of salt cod on the docks. This went on for centuries, this logging. Fish are extremely sensitive to water temperatures, so the catch corresponds to how many were there, so the variation in numbers tells you what the sea water temps were on the Icelandic Shoals. Documentation of the Medieval Warm Period trumps wailing by True Believers of the Humans Cause Global Warming religion. As it is unlawful to fund religions with federal and state taxpayer dollars, getting it declared a religious cult would defund it, removing the money from the equation and thus ending the scam.

 

Meanwhile, historically, melt periods between glaciations tends to last about 18-20 thousand years. The Great Warming was 19,500 years ago. So the ice should come back anytime now. Possibly in our lifetimes. A Russian study on Wrangell Island, north of the Bering Strait, suggests that the ice age can come on in merely 20 years rather than thousands like you'd think. This has led to some truly terrible movies that seemed to be powered by cocaine and ignorance. Most American scientists think that it might be more like 40 years for a full 10'C temp drop to occur. It is important to remember that just because global cooling has happened, it won't be all at once. It takes a long time, even with ideal conditions for snow, for that to accumulate into sufficient ice that its weight starts it flowing off the mountain tops and changing the climate around it as it goes. Thousands of years will pass while these glaciers advance, but once they reach a large enough size, a meter a day is 360 m per year, a kilometer every 3 years, and how many kilometers between that origin to the next glacier over? And the next? And all of it accumulates and moves. That's an implacable thing that we must adapt to, but the upside is we already did it once.

 

Our species is older than the ice ages, barely, though we didn't have modern minds until 133,000 years ago. We've been through this before. We can get through it again. And most of the tropics were still very tropical, and despite rushing rivers and flooded lakes, California would have been amusing away from the heavy weather on the coasts. Watching glaciers advance will be hilarious for webcam operated wheeled drones broadcasting to the internet. A lot easier to fix than the ones on Mars. Frequent rains in the Southwest means there's enough water to justify more homes and cities there, and tripling the flow into the Colorado fixes the treaty issues, meaning there's more water to share out. Baja should bloom. Same with the Sahara and the dry parts of Spain and Morocco. The Persian Gulf will empty and the Saudis and Iranians can have tank battles instead of throw missiles across the water. Removing this humidity from the Arabian Peninsula will have some profound effects on their climate and long term plans for desalination. When the water goes back to the Indian Ocean, what are they going to do? Build new plants? Run pipelines from Oman? Move away? Sea Levels will drop 80 meters, remember. It doesn't happen all at once, but it is relentless as the glaciers grow.

 

Ice age water levels are non-trivial, and their effects will be quite interesting. Florida Keys and Bahamas will lose a lot of islands and gain a lot of spits and peninsulas as the islands merge. The Gulf stream will have to change its course and may slow down in response. I haven't seen any studies on how falling sea levels will affect that, but I'm pretty curious. Spits and mud flats stink in ways that lagoons don't, so some of the popular resort properties will stop being popular and stop being resorts. That's life. It doesn't require religion, just time. If you are around long enough, you get to see this happen yourself. Just imagine the whining when they have to pave the Venice streets because the water levels have fallen so far you can't even dredge there without undermining foundations. Hilarious.