Future Ice Age Put on the Back Burner

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

August 31, 2007

Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton has published a report in the latest edition of New Scientist magazine laying out his research that future ice-ages – an evolutionary imperative for the planet earth – could be pushed back some half a million years.

Using a mathematical model, Tyrrell and his team focused on marine chemistry, and how it is and will be affected by rising carbon levels in the planets oceans. The rising levels of acidity present in the oceans are a direct result of the fossil fuels that humans have been burning. The levels are such that they are dissolving the calcium carbonate in the shells produced by surface-dwelling marine organisms, which then produces further CO₂.

The study done by Tyrrell’s team is part-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and backs up earlier research done by David Archer of the University of Chicago, who was the first noted to suggest that rising CO₂ would affect further ice-ages.

“Our research shows why atmospheric CO₂ will not return to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil fuels it doesn’t matter at what rate we burn them. The result would be the same if we burned them at present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention result.”

An ice-age is supposed to occur every 100,000 years or so, and it has been a tool that the earth has used to cleanse the troubled surfaces. Glaciers would make their way slowly down close to the equator, and upon their retreat millions of years later, new ground is exposed for those animals that survived.

This idea is also picked up in a book by Alan Weisman entitled The World Without Us, where he discussed how long it would take for the planets oceans to reach a state of normality long forgotten. The general consensus from both Tyrrell and Weisman seems to be that the damage we have perpetrated on the planet has irrevocably damaged the normal cycle, the ebb and flow, of glacial movement.

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