Atlantis and the Coming Ice Age: The Lost Civilization - A Mirror of Our World
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Extract from Chap. 7 "The Great Winter"
Whether the Rebellion of Earth predicted by ancient Mesoamerican ancestors and calculated for the near future heralds a global renewal, as some twenty-first-century investigators predict, or a worldwide catastrophe as suggested by the Maya themselves remains to be seen. Its very name—the Rebellion of Earth—does, however, suggest an ecological catastrophe of the kind conservationists have been warning against and Hollywood producers have been making movies about since the late twentieth century. To be sure, the Rebellion of Earth seems to anticipate the disastrous consequences of environmental abuse some observers believe have been accumulating in Earth’s biosphere since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. If, or especially when, such a calamity takes place is cogent to the impending 4-Ollin.
More certain, however, than debatable scenarios for some abrupt adversity sparked by a polluting global economy are prospects for a coming ice age. The last one ended around 9500 BCE, which means that another is due just now, according to paleoclimatologists. Their study of the geologic record shows that ice ages begin and end about every one hundred thousand years, punctuated by less cold, geologically briefer intervals every twelve thousand years. Some researchers conclude that the past dozen millennia more likely represent a warm interlude in an ice age that is still in progress. If so, the resumption of far colder conditions worldwide is not only unavoidable but due to snap back with a suddenness that can paralyze most life on Earth.
Pravda’s online website caused an international stir in early 2009 when it headlined “Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age.” The article by science writer Gregory F. Fegel tells of a growing consensus among climatologists concerning “the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. . . . The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years.”{1}
Fegel refers to recent studies by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a staff researcher with the Oceanology Institute at the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in Moscow. Sorokhtin and his colleagues found that their research of Earth climate change over the past one hundred thousand years “strongly indicates the imminent climax of the Holocene [our present geological epoch] and its sudden replacement by a new glacial age during the first half of the present century.”{2}
Other Russian climate experts concur. “By the mid-21st century the planet will face another little ice age similar to the Maunder Minimum [the previous little ice age],” according to Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Russian space research laboratory. It must come, he states, “because the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041.”{3}
Most of Abdusamatov’s colleagues disagree only with his relatively moderate assessment of the coming glaciation. They anticipate something far colder and enduring than the Maunder Minimum. Fegel reports:
The Earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve-thousand-year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.{4}
Russian scientists are not alone in predicting a new ice age for our immediate future. Climatologists of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment Colloquium (a nonprofit collaboration of environmental scientists, practitioners, and the interested public in Lebanon, Oregon) agree that the Northern Hemisphere is in immediate danger of “an imminent transition to ice.”{5} In their institute article “An Urgent Signal for the Coming Ice Age,” Peter Harris and John Faraday point out how “the geological record shows that the transitions are sudden, long term and extreme.”{6}
Scientific awareness of ice age causation and its cyclical return is not new. As long ago as 1842, the French mathematician Joseph Alphonse Adhemar first proposed that our planet’s glacial episodes result from regular alterations in its angular relationship with the sun.{7} Although contemporary scholars rejected Adhemar’s theory, it was taken up and elaborated thirty-three years later in Scotland by James Croll, an elected fellow of the Royal Society and correspondent of Charles Darwin. In Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations, Croll cites variations of Earth’s orbit on climate cycles. He was the first scientist to identify the ability of ice-albedo to magnify solar feedback (albedo is the reflecting power of a surface). During periods of high orbital eccentricity, he argues, ice ages take place in regular cycles.{8}
Building on the ideas of Adhemar and Croll during 1930, a geophysicist genius in the Balkans, Milutin Milanković, demonstrated a correlation between glacial activity and Earth’s gradually alternating angles toward the sun. Earlier he revised the Julian calendar for the Serbian Orthodox Church. Wikipedia declares, “His calendar is, in fact, the most accurate calendar in the world today.”{9}
Milanković found that ices ages correlate to the tilt of our planet over a forty-one-thousand-year time span; the shape of its orbit, which alters during a one-hundred-thousand-year period; and the precession of the equinoxes, or “wobble,” gradually rotating in the direction of Earth’s axis every twenty-six thousand years. These cycles affect the amount of solar radiation reaching our planet and combine to produce the alternating ice age maximums and warm interglacials.
Milanković’s discoveries were greeted with uncertainty by other scientists, then gradually dismissed as improvable until the late twentieth century. In early 1968, Wallace S. Broecker, the Columbia geophysicist who coined the term global warming seven years later, found that the Milanković hypothesis was “supported by precise dating of coral reefs and deep-sea sediments.”{10} According to Harris and Faraday, “When paleoclimatologists met in 1972 to discuss how and when the present warm climate would end, it was expected that rapid cooling would lead to the coming ice age.”{11} Satellite monitoring of the biosphere then confirmed Milanković’s solar-glacial cycles. “These data sets may be used to serve as a signal for the coming ice age,” Harris and Faraday suggest.{12}
Four years later Science magazine published a virtual validation of Milanković’s work in “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages.” Authors John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton announced a correlation they uncovered between climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and Milanković’s Earth-sun relationship. Combined, “the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate.”{13}
Today, Milanković’s explanation is, as Pravda asserts, “the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists.”{14} Their reconsideration of his proposals in the 1970s was prompted by growing concern for climate deterioration generally and an understanding of its mechanism. A 1974 issue of Time magazine reported that “38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather.”{15}
Observers from various scientific fields participating in the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) found that a mere 1 percent decrease in the amount of sunlight striking the surface of Earth could tip the climatic balance sufficiently to cool temperatures and precipitate an ice age in a very short time. They learned, too, that temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5 percent of the past seven hundred thousand years; in other words, our climate has been enjoying an anomalous warm phase that cannot last much longer.{16}
While GARP researchers were endeavoring to determine just when the next glaciation might take place, others at CLIMAP (Climate: Long range Investigation Mapping, and Prediction) hauled up deep-sea core drillings going back over the last half million years to discover that the coming and going of ice ages closely follows Milanković’s cycles of precession, orbital shape, and rotational wobble. The ocean-bottom cores also showed that glaciation sometimes began and ended with great suddenness.
The Younger Dryas stadial, also referred to as the Big Freeze, was a brief thirteen-hundred-year cold snap that afflicted the world about twelve thousand years ago. (A stadial is a period of lower temperatures during an interglacial, or warm period, of an ice age.) Within a single decade, temperatures plummeted worldwide. Increased snowfall blanketed every mountain range on Earth, all of Scandinavia’s forests were reduced to tundra, and drought overcame the Levant. In North America, numerous animal species went extinct, while the Clovis culture—an early society of Paleo-Indians—entered a steep decline from which it would never recover.
The respected editor of New Scientist magazine, Nigel Calder, was sufficiently alarmed by these disclosures to declare in the July 1975 issue of International Wildlife magazine, “The facts have emerged in recent years and months from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”{17}
Climate research in the following decades confirmed and deepened the worst suspicions about glaciation. The Greenland Ice Core Project of 1987 sent an improved drilling apparatus nearly two miles beneath Earth’s surface to retrieve samples formed over the past quarter-of-a-million years. The specimens revealed that every ice age within that time parameter began abruptly.
The British scientific journal Nature reported in 1999 that Antarctic ice cores collected at Lake Vostok demonstrated how glacial maximums alternate with warm periods known as interstadials in recognizable patterns, yet again confirming Milanković’s hypothesis. The Lake Vostok cores showed that “today we are near to the end of a warm interglacial,” according to Pravda, “and the Earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age.”{18}
Its expected arrival seems at odds with concerns for global warming caused by industrial pollution. While debate still rages over civilization’s effect on the natural environment, any questions regarding climate deterioration due to interference by modern humans may be knocked into a cocked hat by Earth’s own rotational cycles, which are responsible for initiating glaciation in recurring patterns. Some scientific observers argue, however, that human meddling in the biosphere does play a direct role in fostering ice-age conditions.
Reid A. Bryson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other climatologists point out that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning block more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of Earth, fostering cooler, wetter conditions that allow for ice ages. His conclusions prompted geologists Gillford H. Miller and Anne Vernal to ask, in a 1992 issue of Nature, “Will Greenhouse warming lead to Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet growth?”{19} They were answered that same year by climatologists Ken Caldera and James Kasting, who revealed the “susceptibility of the early Earth to irreversible glaciation caused by carbon dioxide clouds.”{20}
At his death in June 2008, Bryson was widely recognized as “a towering figure in climatology and interdisciplinary studies of climate, people and the environment.”{21} According to his obituary by Terry Devit, he “pioneered the use of computer models in climate science . . . was among the first to explore the influence of climate on humans and human culture and, in turn, some of the human impacts on climate. He was an early developer of simple computer models to study the causes of past climate change, comparing those simulations with records of paleoclimate and human culture.”{22}
John Kutzbach, University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, said of Bryson, “His interdisciplinary interests and knowledge of these topics allowed him to see connections that others missed and to initiate studies that are still at the cutting edge of climate research.”{23} Given his recognition as the pioneer of climatology, Bryson’s belief in human contribution to prospects for a new ice age deserves serious consideration. He was, however, less a proponent of either global warming or cooling than of climate destabilization, in which extremes of both increasingly hot and cold conditions irregularly alternate with each other.
“The principal weather change likely to accompany the cooling trend is increased variability—alternating extremes of temperature and precipitation in any given area,” science writer John H. Douglas explains in Science News magazine.{24} He continues:
The cause of this increased variability can best be seen by examining upper atmosphere wind patterns that accompany cooler climate. During warm periods, a “zonal circulation” predominates, in which the prevailing westerly winds of the temperate zones are swept over long distances by a few powerful high and low pressure centers. The result is a more evenly distributed pattern of weather, varying relatively little from month to month or season to season. During colder climate periods, however, the high-altitude winds are broken up into irregular cells by weaker and more plentiful pressure cells, causing formation of a “meridional circulation” pattern. These small, weak cells may stagnate over vast areas for many months, bringing unseasonably cold weather on one side and unseasonably warm weather on the other. . . . Thus, while the hemisphere as a whole is cooler, individual areas may alternately break temperature and precipitation records at both extremes.{25}
Whether the Rebellion of Earth predicted by ancient Mesoamerican ancestors and calculated for the near future heralds a global renewal, as some twenty-first-century investigators predict, or a worldwide catastrophe as suggested by the Maya themselves remains to be seen. Its very name—the Rebellion of Earth—does, however, suggest an ecological catastrophe of the kind conservationists have been warning against and Hollywood producers have been making movies about since the late twentieth century. To be sure, the Rebellion of Earth seems to anticipate the disastrous consequences of environmental abuse some observers believe have been accumulating in Earth’s biosphere since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. If, or especially when, such a calamity takes place is cogent to the impending 4-Ollin.
More certain, however, than debatable scenarios for some abrupt adversity sparked by a polluting global economy are prospects for a coming ice age. The last one ended around 9500 BCE, which means that another is due just now, according to paleoclimatologists. Their study of the geologic record shows that ice ages begin and end about every one hundred thousand years, punctuated by less cold, geologically briefer intervals every twelve thousand years. Some researchers conclude that the past dozen millennia more likely represent a warm interlude in an ice age that is still in progress. If so, the resumption of far colder conditions worldwide is not only unavoidable but due to snap back with a suddenness that can paralyze most life on Earth.
Pravda’s online website caused an international stir in early 2009 when it headlined “Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age.” The article by science writer Gregory F. Fegel tells of a growing consensus among climatologists concerning “the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. . . . The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years.”{1}
Fegel refers to recent studies by Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, a staff researcher with the Oceanology Institute at the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in Moscow. Sorokhtin and his colleagues found that their research of Earth climate change over the past one hundred thousand years “strongly indicates the imminent climax of the Holocene [our present geological epoch] and its sudden replacement by a new glacial age during the first half of the present century.”{2}
Other Russian climate experts concur. “By the mid-21st century the planet will face another little ice age similar to the Maunder Minimum [the previous little ice age],” according to Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the Russian space research laboratory. It must come, he states, “because the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041.”{3}
Most of Abdusamatov’s colleagues disagree only with his relatively moderate assessment of the coming glaciation. They anticipate something far colder and enduring than the Maunder Minimum. Fegel reports:
The Earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve-thousand-year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.{4}
Russian scientists are not alone in predicting a new ice age for our immediate future. Climatologists of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment Colloquium (a nonprofit collaboration of environmental scientists, practitioners, and the interested public in Lebanon, Oregon) agree that the Northern Hemisphere is in immediate danger of “an imminent transition to ice.”{5} In their institute article “An Urgent Signal for the Coming Ice Age,” Peter Harris and John Faraday point out how “the geological record shows that the transitions are sudden, long term and extreme.”{6}
Scientific awareness of ice age causation and its cyclical return is not new. As long ago as 1842, the French mathematician Joseph Alphonse Adhemar first proposed that our planet’s glacial episodes result from regular alterations in its angular relationship with the sun.{7} Although contemporary scholars rejected Adhemar’s theory, it was taken up and elaborated thirty-three years later in Scotland by James Croll, an elected fellow of the Royal Society and correspondent of Charles Darwin. In Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations, Croll cites variations of Earth’s orbit on climate cycles. He was the first scientist to identify the ability of ice-albedo to magnify solar feedback (albedo is the reflecting power of a surface). During periods of high orbital eccentricity, he argues, ice ages take place in regular cycles.{8}
Building on the ideas of Adhemar and Croll during 1930, a geophysicist genius in the Balkans, Milutin Milanković, demonstrated a correlation between glacial activity and Earth’s gradually alternating angles toward the sun. Earlier he revised the Julian calendar for the Serbian Orthodox Church. Wikipedia declares, “His calendar is, in fact, the most accurate calendar in the world today.”{9}
Milanković found that ices ages correlate to the tilt of our planet over a forty-one-thousand-year time span; the shape of its orbit, which alters during a one-hundred-thousand-year period; and the precession of the equinoxes, or “wobble,” gradually rotating in the direction of Earth’s axis every twenty-six thousand years. These cycles affect the amount of solar radiation reaching our planet and combine to produce the alternating ice age maximums and warm interglacials.
Milanković’s discoveries were greeted with uncertainty by other scientists, then gradually dismissed as improvable until the late twentieth century. In early 1968, Wallace S. Broecker, the Columbia geophysicist who coined the term global warming seven years later, found that the Milanković hypothesis was “supported by precise dating of coral reefs and deep-sea sediments.”{10} According to Harris and Faraday, “When paleoclimatologists met in 1972 to discuss how and when the present warm climate would end, it was expected that rapid cooling would lead to the coming ice age.”{11} Satellite monitoring of the biosphere then confirmed Milanković’s solar-glacial cycles. “These data sets may be used to serve as a signal for the coming ice age,” Harris and Faraday suggest.{12}
Four years later Science magazine published a virtual validation of Milanković’s work in “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages.” Authors John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton announced a correlation they uncovered between climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and Milanković’s Earth-sun relationship. Combined, “the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate.”{13}
Today, Milanković’s explanation is, as Pravda asserts, “the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists.”{14} Their reconsideration of his proposals in the 1970s was prompted by growing concern for climate deterioration generally and an understanding of its mechanism. A 1974 issue of Time magazine reported that “38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather.”{15}
Observers from various scientific fields participating in the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) found that a mere 1 percent decrease in the amount of sunlight striking the surface of Earth could tip the climatic balance sufficiently to cool temperatures and precipitate an ice age in a very short time. They learned, too, that temperatures have been as high as they are now only about 5 percent of the past seven hundred thousand years; in other words, our climate has been enjoying an anomalous warm phase that cannot last much longer.{16}
While GARP researchers were endeavoring to determine just when the next glaciation might take place, others at CLIMAP (Climate: Long range Investigation Mapping, and Prediction) hauled up deep-sea core drillings going back over the last half million years to discover that the coming and going of ice ages closely follows Milanković’s cycles of precession, orbital shape, and rotational wobble. The ocean-bottom cores also showed that glaciation sometimes began and ended with great suddenness.
The Younger Dryas stadial, also referred to as the Big Freeze, was a brief thirteen-hundred-year cold snap that afflicted the world about twelve thousand years ago. (A stadial is a period of lower temperatures during an interglacial, or warm period, of an ice age.) Within a single decade, temperatures plummeted worldwide. Increased snowfall blanketed every mountain range on Earth, all of Scandinavia’s forests were reduced to tundra, and drought overcame the Levant. In North America, numerous animal species went extinct, while the Clovis culture—an early society of Paleo-Indians—entered a steep decline from which it would never recover.
The respected editor of New Scientist magazine, Nigel Calder, was sufficiently alarmed by these disclosures to declare in the July 1975 issue of International Wildlife magazine, “The facts have emerged in recent years and months from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”{17}
Climate research in the following decades confirmed and deepened the worst suspicions about glaciation. The Greenland Ice Core Project of 1987 sent an improved drilling apparatus nearly two miles beneath Earth’s surface to retrieve samples formed over the past quarter-of-a-million years. The specimens revealed that every ice age within that time parameter began abruptly.
The British scientific journal Nature reported in 1999 that Antarctic ice cores collected at Lake Vostok demonstrated how glacial maximums alternate with warm periods known as interstadials in recognizable patterns, yet again confirming Milanković’s hypothesis. The Lake Vostok cores showed that “today we are near to the end of a warm interglacial,” according to Pravda, “and the Earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age.”{18}
Its expected arrival seems at odds with concerns for global warming caused by industrial pollution. While debate still rages over civilization’s effect on the natural environment, any questions regarding climate deterioration due to interference by modern humans may be knocked into a cocked hat by Earth’s own rotational cycles, which are responsible for initiating glaciation in recurring patterns. Some scientific observers argue, however, that human meddling in the biosphere does play a direct role in fostering ice-age conditions.
Reid A. Bryson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other climatologists point out that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning block more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of Earth, fostering cooler, wetter conditions that allow for ice ages. His conclusions prompted geologists Gillford H. Miller and Anne Vernal to ask, in a 1992 issue of Nature, “Will Greenhouse warming lead to Northern Hemisphere ice-sheet growth?”{19} They were answered that same year by climatologists Ken Caldera and James Kasting, who revealed the “susceptibility of the early Earth to irreversible glaciation caused by carbon dioxide clouds.”{20}
At his death in June 2008, Bryson was widely recognized as “a towering figure in climatology and interdisciplinary studies of climate, people and the environment.”{21} According to his obituary by Terry Devit, he “pioneered the use of computer models in climate science . . . was among the first to explore the influence of climate on humans and human culture and, in turn, some of the human impacts on climate. He was an early developer of simple computer models to study the causes of past climate change, comparing those simulations with records of paleoclimate and human culture.”{22}
John Kutzbach, University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, said of Bryson, “His interdisciplinary interests and knowledge of these topics allowed him to see connections that others missed and to initiate studies that are still at the cutting edge of climate research.”{23} Given his recognition as the pioneer of climatology, Bryson’s belief in human contribution to prospects for a new ice age deserves serious consideration. He was, however, less a proponent of either global warming or cooling than of climate destabilization, in which extremes of both increasingly hot and cold conditions irregularly alternate with each other.
“The principal weather change likely to accompany the cooling trend is increased variability—alternating extremes of temperature and precipitation in any given area,” science writer John H. Douglas explains in Science News magazine.{24} He continues:
The cause of this increased variability can best be seen by examining upper atmosphere wind patterns that accompany cooler climate. During warm periods, a “zonal circulation” predominates, in which the prevailing westerly winds of the temperate zones are swept over long distances by a few powerful high and low pressure centers. The result is a more evenly distributed pattern of weather, varying relatively little from month to month or season to season. During colder climate periods, however, the high-altitude winds are broken up into irregular cells by weaker and more plentiful pressure cells, causing formation of a “meridional circulation” pattern. These small, weak cells may stagnate over vast areas for many months, bringing unseasonably cold weather on one side and unseasonably warm weather on the other. . . . Thus, while the hemisphere as a whole is cooler, individual areas may alternately break temperature and precipitation records at both extremes.{25}
Merlin
Jedi Master
. . .not read the Book but thats all old hat now ever since "Atlantis in Spain" was published by EM Whishaw (1928) . . . .you all may like to see this fascinating Video by Wayne Herschel, amateur Astronomer from South Africa on how Spain is Atlantis . . .
