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Anyone seriously interested in global warming needs to learn about the 'ice ages', or more technically 'glacial periods'. After all, these are some of the most prominent natural variations in the Earth's temperature. And they're rather mysterious. They could be caused by changes in the Earth's orbit called Milankovich cycles... but the evidence is not completely compelling. I want to talk about that.
But to understand ice ages, the first thing we need to know is that the Earth hasn't always had them! The Earth's climate has been cooling and becoming more erratic for the last 35 million years, with full-blown glacial periods kicking in only about 1.8 million years ago.
So, this week let's start with a little tour of the Earth's climate history. Somewhat arbitrarily, let's begin with the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. Here's a graph of what the temperature has been doing since then:
Of course you should have lots of questions about how this graph was made, and how well we really know these ancient temperatures! But for now I'm just giving a quick overview—click on the graphs for more. In future weeks I should delve into more technical details.
The Paleocene began with a bang, as an asteroid 10 kilometers across hit the Gulf of Mexico in an explosion two million times larger than the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated. A megatsunami thousands of meters high ripped across the Atlantic, and molten quartz hurled high into the atmosphere ignited wildfires over the whole planet. A day to remember, for sure.
The Earth looked like this back then:
The Paleocene started out hot: the ocean was 10° to 15° Celsius warmer than today. Then it got even hotter! Besides a gradual temperature rise, at the very end of this epoch there was a drastic incident called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum— that's the spike labelled "PETM". Ocean surface temperatures worldwide shot up by 5-8°C for a few thousand years—but in the Arctic, it heated up even more, to a balmy 23°C. This caused a severe dieoff of little ocean critters called foraminifera, and a drastic change of the dominant mammal species. What caused it? That's a good question, but right now I'm just giving you a quick tour.
During the Eocene, temperatures continued to rise until the so-called 'Eocene Optimum', about halfway through. Even at the start, the continents were close to where they are now—but the average annual temperature in arctic Canada and Siberia was a balmy 18 °C. The dominant plants up there were palm trees and cycads. Fossil monitor lizards (sort of like alligators) dating back to this era have been found in Svalbard, an island north of Greenland that's now covered with ice all year. Antarctica was home to cool temperate forests, including beech trees and ferns. In particular, our Earth had no permanent polar ice caps!
Life back then was very different. The biggest member of the order Carnivora, which now includes dogs, cats, bears, and the like, was merely the size of a housecat. The largest predatory mammals were of another, now extinct order: the creodonts, like this one drawn by Dmitry Bogdanov:
But the biggest predator of all was not a mammal: it was Diatryma, the 8-foot tall "terror bird", with a fearsome beak!
But it's not as huge as it looks here, because horses were only half a meter high back then!
For more on this strange world and its end as the Earth cooled, see:
As the Eocene drew to a close, temperatures began to drop. And at the start of the Oligocene, they plummeted! Glaciers started forming in Antarctica. The growth of ice sheets led to a dropping of the sea level. Tropical jungles gave ground to cooler woodlands.
What caused this? That's another good question. Some seek the answer in plate tectonics. The Oligocene is when India collided with Asia, throwing up the Himalayas and the vast Tibetan plateau. Some argue this led to a significant change in global weather patterns. But this is also the time when Australia and South America finally separated from Antarctica. Some argue that the formation of an ocean completely surrounding Antarctica led to the cooling weather patterns. After all, that lets cold water go round and round Antarctica without ever being driven up towards the equator.
Near the end of the Oligocene temperatures shot up again and the Antarctic thawed. Then it cooled, then it warmed again... but by the middle of the Miocene, temperatures began to drop more seriously, and glaciers again formed on the Antarctic. It's been frozen ever since. Why all these temperature fluctuations? That's another good question.
The Miocene is when grasslands first became common. It's sort of amazing that something we take so much for granted—grass—can be so new! But grasslands, as opposed to thicker forests and jungles, are characteristic of cooler climates. And as Nigel Calder has suggested, grasslands were crucial to the development of humans! Early hominids lived on the border between forests and grasslands. That has a lot to do with why we stand on our hind legs and have hands rather than paws. Much later, the agricultural revolution relied heavily on grasses like wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, rye, and millet. As we ate more of these plants, we drastically transformed them by breeding, and removed forests to grow more grasses. In return, the grasses drastically transformed us: the ability to stockpile surplus grains ended our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and gave rise to cities, kingdoms, and slave labor.
So, you could say we coevolved with grasses!
Indeed, the sequence of developments leading to humans came shortly after the rise of grasslands. Apes split off from monkeys 21 million years ago, in the Miocene. The genus Homo split off from other apes like gorillas and chimpanzees 5 million years ago, near the beginning of the Pliocene. The fully bipedal Homo erectus dates back to 1.9 million years ago, near the end of the Pliocene. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
Starting around the Pliocene, the Earth's temperature has been getting every more jittery as it cools. Something is making the temperature unstable! And these fluctuations are not just getting more severe—they're also lasting longer.
These temperature fluctuations are not really periodic, despite the optimistic labels on the above graph saying "41 kiloyear cycle" and "100 kiloyear cycle". And beware: the data in the above graph was manipulated so it would synchronize with the Milankovitch cycles! Is that really justified? Do these cycles really cause the changes in the Earth's climate? More good questions.
Here's a graph that shows more clearly the noisy nature of the Earth's climate in the last 7 million years:
You can tell this graph was made by a real paleontologist, because they like to put the present on the left instead of on the right.
And maybe you're getting curious about this "δ18O benthic carbonate" business? Well, we can't directly measure the temperatures long ago by sticking a thermometer into an ancient rock! We need to use 'climate proxies': things we can measure now, that we believe are correlated to features of the climate long ago. δ18O is the change in the amount of oxygen-18 (a less common, heavier isotope of oxygen) in carbonate deposits dug up from ancient ocean sediments. These deposits were made by foraminifera and other tiny ocean critters. The amount of oxygen-18 in these deposits is used as temperature proxy: the more of it there is, the colder we think it was. Why? That's another good question.
By the beginning of the Pleistocene, the Earth's jerky temperature variations became full-fledged 'glacial cycles'. In the last million years there have been about ten glacial cycles, though it's hard to count them in any precise way—it's like counting mountains in a mountain range:
Now the present is on the right again—but just to keep you on your toes, here up means cold, or at least more oxygen-18. I copied this graph from:
We can get some more detail on the last four glacial periods from the change in the amount of deuterium in Vostok and EPICA ice core samples, and also changes in the amount of oxygen-18 in foraminifera (that's the graph labelled 'Ice Volume'):
As you can see here, the third-to-last glacial ended about 380,000 years ago. In the warm period that followed, the first signs of Homo neanderthalensis appear about 350,000 years ago, and the first Homo sapiens about 250,000 years ago.
Then, 200,000 years ago, came the second-to-last glacial period: the Wolstonian. This lasted until about 130,000 years ago. Then came a warm period called the Eemian, which lasted until about 110,000 years ago. During the Eemian, Neanderthalers hunted rhinos in Switzerland! It was a bit warmer then that it is now, and sea levels may have been about 4-6 meters higher—worth thinking about, if you're interested in the effects of global warming.
The last glacial period started around 110,000 years ago. This is called the Winsconsinan or Würm period, depending on location... but let's just call it the last glacial period.
A lot happened during the last glacial period. Homo sapiens reached the Middle East 100,000 years ago, and arrived in central Asia 50 thousand years ago. The Neanderthalers died out in Asia around that time. They died out in Europe 35 thousand years ago, about when Homo sapiens got there. Anyone notice a pattern?
The oldest cave paintings are 32 thousand years old, and the oldest known calendars and flutes also date back to about this time. It's striking how many radical innovations go back to about this time.
The glaciers reached their maximum extent around 26 to 18 thousand years ago. There were ice sheets down to the Great Lakes in America, and covering the British Isles, Scandinavia, and northern Germany. Much of Europe was tundra. And so much water was locked up in ice that the sea level was 120 meters lower than it is today!
Then things started to warm up. About 18 thousand years ago, Homo sapiens arrived in America. In Eurasia, people started cultivating plants and herding of animals around this time.
There was, however, a shocking setback 12,700 years ago: the Younger Dryas episode, a cold period lasting about 1,300 years. We talked about this in "week304", so I won't go into it again here.
The Younger Dryas ended about 11,500 years ago. The last glacial period, and with it the Pleistocene, officially ended 10,000 years ago. Or more precisely: 10,000 BP. Whenever I've been saying 'years ago', I really mean Before Present, where the 'present', you'll be amused to learn, is officially set in 1950. Of course the precise definition of 'the present' doesn't matter much for very ancient events, but it would be annoying if a thousand years from now we had to revise all the textbooks to say the Pleistocene ended 11,000 years ago. It'll still be 10,000 BP.
(But if 1950 was the present, now it's the future! This could explain why such weird science-fiction-type stuff is happening.)
As far as geology goes, the Holocene is a rather silly epoch, not like the rest. It's just a name for the time since the last ice age ended. In the long run it'll probably be called the Early Anthropocene, since it marks the start of truly massive impacts of Homo sapiens on the biosphere. We may have started killing off species in the late Pleistocene, but now we're killing more—and changing the climate, perhaps even postponing the next glacial period.
Here's what the temperature has been doing since 12,000 BC:
Finally, here's a closeup of a tiny sliver of time: the last 2000 years:
In both these graphs, different colored lines correspond to different studies; click for details. The biggish error bars give people lots to argue about, as you may have noticed. But right now I'm more interested in the big picture, and questions like these:
Next time we'll get into a bit more detail. For now, here are some fun easy things to read.
This is a very enjoyable overview of climate change during the Holocene, and its effect on human civilization:
These dig a bit further back:
I couldn't stomach the style of the second one: it's written as a narrative, with a character named Lubbock travelling through time. But a lot of people like it, and they say it's well-researched.
For a history of how people discovered and learned about ice ages, try:
For something a bit more technical, but still introductory, try:
To learn how this graph was made:
and to read a good overview of the Earth's climate throughout the Cenozoic, try this:
I got the beautiful maps illustrating continental drift from here:
and I urge you to check out this website for a nice visual tour of the Earth's history.
Finally, I thank Frederik de Roo and Nathan Urban for suggesting improvements to this issue. You can see what they said on the Azimuth Forum. If you join the forum, you too can help write This Week's Finds! I could really use help from earth scientists, biologists, paleontologists and folks like that: I'm okay at math and physics, but I'm trying to broaden the scope now.
For more discussion go to my blog, Azimuth.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. - Richard Feynman
© 2011 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu
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