According to Dr. Mark McMenamin of Mt. Holyoke College...
[G]laciers are going to move down and grind New York into the North Atlantic ocean.
How the Earth was Made
A brand new two-hour documentary, How the Earth was Made, is now showing on The History Channel. Be sure to catch it if you can, because it is the best of its kind I've ever seen. [Link is at the bottom of this article.]
Most of the program is a chronological exposition of earth's 4.5 billion year history, pieced together by generations of scientific thought about how to explain the mounting evidence in the geological record. The first 110 minutes show, in spectacular graphic detail, how earth evolved prior to becoming today's human-friendly environment. (In order: Hell; then Waterworld; then Iceball; then Jungle; then Today. Most of the time, life and volcanoes play a huge role. Don't let that summary spoil it; watch the whole thing.)
The Coming Ice Age
In the last ten minutes of the program, after covering earth's first 4,499,990,000 years, scientists explain the most recent hundred centuries we've been enjoying.
It’s definitely not coincidence that civilization has developed over this period of time, because the climate is so favorable to our species to develop and flourish. The period we live in the moment, climate-wise, over the last let’s say ten thousand years is exceptionally stable, almost unbelievably stable if you look into the geological record. It certainly will not stay forever like that.
—Dr. Joerg Shaefer, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
What's in store for us in the near future? I was expecting to hear about the human-induced runaway greenhouse effect that would boil the oceans and turn earth into a Venus-like sulphuric acid pressure cooker. But I was in for a surprise...
[Narrator:] Our first major challenge will be the climate at the start of the 21st century. We may worry about global warming, but most scientists recognize that we are in a gap between ice ages. Our whole civilization has occurred in a brief warm period, ten thousand years so far. This warmth has proved crucial...
Even if our industrial economies effect a global warming over the next couple of centuries, it can do no more than delay the inevitable.
[Dr. McMenamin:] The New York area is going to be completely changed by the next cycle of glaciation, and at some point glaciers are going to move down and grind New York into the North Atlantic ocean.
In other words, earth-induced global freezing will overwhelm any human-induced global warming. [Come to think of it, maybe George Carlin wasn't far off the mark when he said, "The earth is gonna shake us off like a bad case of fleas."]
I wonder if the climate models are predicting the approaching Ice Age? If not, why not? If so, why haven't we been hearing about it in the mainstream press? A new Ice Age will make the sea level drop, push humans toward the equator, and severely disrupt economies and national boundaries—if not turn the entire earth into a frozen, Europa-like ice ball. Seems to me that's newsworthy.
Fortunately, the documentary implies we have a few hundred years to prepare for the new Ice Age. Wouldn't it be wise to start discussing today how future generations might make an orderly-as-possible transition to the coming, much-colder world?
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Watch the documentary if you are at all interested in our planet's history. It is a top quality production. I caught it on the History Channel, but it's also available for purchase. Here's the link:
• How the Earth was Made
