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To: American Dream 246

Ahem. We’ve BEEN in an Ice Age for the past 10+ million years, we’re only in an interglacial now, for about the last 10,000 years.

Oh, and BTW, the typical interglacial lasts ~10000 years, +/- a few thousand years. . .


11 posted on 01/09/2010 5:38:41 PM PST by Salgak (Acme Lasers presents: The Energizer Border: I dare you to try and cross it. . .)
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To: Salgak
We can only prove the last 2.0 to 2.5 million years though. That's as deep as the Antarctic ice goes where you can actually count on the layers being intact.

There is, of course, more ice down there, but it's pretty mangled, and may well have been completely melted ~ at least in the places where we are able to drill.

Over the last 2.0 million years the ice clearly shows that we've had 20 major glacial periods where ice predominates in the Northern Hemisphere. They were each punctuated by major interglacials that lasted 10,000 or more years.

Within the glacial periods there are smaller warm periods called interstadials. They last less than 10,000 years.

We are presently 5,000 years overdue for the beginning of the next glacial period. That means that something happened to forestall it and allow us to flop on over into an interstadial. It could be that we are at the end of the 2.0 million year long period of recurring glaciation, or we used agriculture to build up enough greenhouse gases that Earth stayed just warm enough to not ice up again.

If human activity has helped keep the Big Ice from forming, we must keep on doing whatever we were doing or we'll have two mile deep piles of ice on top of half the United States!

The Algore and his cronies are playing a very dangerous game.

24 posted on 01/09/2010 6:21:10 PM PST by muawiyah ("Git Out The Way")
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