A new ice age will begin. Climate chaos is coming. The Little Ice Age is coming. How to survive the ice age
When you travel through the Swiss Alps or through the Canadian Rockies, you will soon notice a huge amount of scattered rocks. Some are as big as houses and often lie in river valleys, although they are obviously too large to be moved by even the most severe flood. Similar erratic boulders can be found at mid-latitudes around the world, although they may be hidden by vegetation or soil layers.
DISCOVERY OF THE ICE AGE
Itinerant scientists of the 18th century, who laid the foundations of geography and geology, considered the appearance of these boulders mysterious, but the truth about their origin has been preserved in local folklore. Swiss peasants told visitors that long ago they were left behind by huge melting glaciers that were once at the bottom of the valley.
At first, scientists were skeptical, but as other evidence of the glacial origin of the fossils came to light, most accepted this explanation of the nature of the boulders in the Swiss Alps. But some have dared to suggest that a once larger glaciation spread from the poles to both hemispheres.
The mineralogist Jene Esmark in 1824 put forward a theory confirming a series of global cold snaps, and the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper in 1837 proposed the term "ice age" to describe such phenomena, but this theory was recognized only after a few decades.
ABOUT TERMINOLOGY
Ice ages are hundreds of millions of years of cooling during which extensive continental ice sheets and deposits are formed. Ice ages are divided into ice ages, which last tens of millions of years. Ice ages consist of glacial epochs - glaciations (glacials), alternating with interglacials (interglacials).
Today, the term "ice age" is often erroneously used to refer to the last ice age, which lasted 100,000 years and ended about 12,000 years ago. It is known for large, cold-adapted mammals such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. However, it would be wrong to consider this era as entirely unfavorable. Since the world's main water supply has disappeared under the ice, the planet has experienced colder, but also drier weather at low sea levels. These are ideal conditions for the resettlement of our ancestors from African lands around the world.
CHRONOLOGY
Our current climate is just an interglacial hiatus in an ice age that could resume in about 20,000 years (if no artificial stimulus comes along). Before the discovery of the threat of global warming, many people considered the cold snap to be the greatest danger to civilization.
The most significant, up to the equator, glaciation of the Earth was characterized by the Cryogenian period (850-630 million years ago) of the Late Proterozoic Ice Age. According to the “Snowball Earth” hypothesis, during this era our planet was completely covered with ice. During the Paleozoic Ice Age (460-230 million years ago), glaciations were shorter and less common. The modern Cenozoic Ice Age began relatively recently, 65 million years ago. It is completed by the Quaternary Ice Age (2.6 million years ago - present).
The earth has probably gone through more ice ages, but the geological record of the Precambrian era is almost completely destroyed by slow but irreversible changes in its surface.
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
At first glance, it seems that there is no pattern to the onset of ice ages, so geologists have long argued about their causes. They are probably caused by certain conditions interacting with each other.
One of the most significant factors is continental drift. This is a gradual displacement of lithospheric plates over tens of millions of years.
If the location of the continents blocks warm ocean currents from the equator to the poles, ice sheets begin to form. This usually occurs if a large land mass is above the pole or polar waters surrounded by nearby continents.
In the Quaternary Ice Age, these conditions are met by Antarctica and the land-locked Arctic Ocean. During the major Cryogenian ice age, a large supercontinent was trapped near the Earth's equator, but the effect was the same. Once formed, ice sheets accelerate the process of global cooling by reflecting solar heat and light into space.
Another important factor is the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. One of the ice ages of the Paleozoic Ice Age may have been caused by the presence of large Antarctic land masses and the spread of land plants, which replaced the large amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, offsetting this thermal effect. According to another theory, the main stages of mountain building led to an increase in precipitation and the acceleration of processes such as chemical weathering, which also removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
SENSITIVE EARTH
The described processes occur over millions of years, but there are also short-term phenomena. Today, most geologists recognize the importance of changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, known as the Milankovitch cycles. Because other processes have placed the Earth in difficult conditions, it has become extremely sensitive to the level of radiation it receives from the Sun depending on the cycle.
In each ice age, there were probably even shorter-term phenomena that cannot be tracked. Only two of them are known for sure: the medieval climatic optimum in the X-XIII centuries. and the Little Ice Age in the XIV-XIX centuries.
The Little Ice Age is often associated with a decline in solar activity. There is evidence that changes in the amount of solar energy have significantly affected the Earth in the last few hundred million years, but, as with the Milankovitch cycles, it is possible that their short-term impact may be enhanced if the planet's climate has already begun to change.
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The next one is still far away
We addressed this question to Suna Rasmussen, lecturer at the Center for Basic Ice and Climate Research at the University of Copenhagen, who studies cold and obtains information about past weather by drilling into Greenland's glaciers and icebergs. In addition, he can use his knowledge to play the role of a predictor of ice ages.
"FOR THE ICE AGE HAS COME, SEVERAL CONDITIONS MUST MATCH. We cannot accurately predict when the ice age will begin, but even if humanity did not influence the climate, our forecast is as follows: the conditions for it will develop in the best case in 40-50 thousand years," Sune Rasmussen reassures.
Since we are still talking with the "ice age predictor", we can get some more information, find out what conditions we are talking about in order to understand a little more about what the ice age actually is.
Sune Rasmussen says that during the last ice age, the average temperature on Earth was a few degrees cooler than today, and the climate at higher latitudes was colder. Much of the northern hemisphere was covered in massive ice sheets. For example, Scandinavia, Canada and some other parts of North America were covered with a three-kilometer ice sheet. The huge weight of the ice cover pressed the earth's crust a kilometer into the Earth.
19,000 years ago, climate change began to occur. This meant that the Earth gradually became warmer and, over the next 7,000 years, freed itself from the cold grip of the Ice Age. After that, the interglacial period began, in which we are now.
In Greenland, the last remnants of the shell came off very abruptly 11,700 years ago, or to be more precise, 11,715 years ago. This is evidenced by the studies of Sune Rasmussen and his colleagues. This means that 11,715 years have passed since the last ice age, and this is a completely normal length of the interglacial.
"It's funny that we usually consider the ice age as an event, although in fact everything is just the opposite. The average ice age lasts 100 thousand years, while the interglacial lasts from 10 to 30 thousand years. That is, the Earth is more often in an ice age, than vice versa."
"The last two interglacial periods were only about 10,000 years each, which explains the widely held but misconception that our current interglacial period is nearing its end," says Sune Rasmussen.
THAT THE EARTH WILL SLOW INTO A NEW ICE AGE AFTER 40-50 THOUSAND YEARS, depends on the fact that the Earth's orbit around the Sun has small variations. Variations determine how much sunlight hits which latitudes, and thereby affects how warm or cold it is. This discovery was made by the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković almost 100 years ago and is therefore known as the Milanković cycle.
Milankovitch cycles are:
1. The Earth's orbit around the Sun, which cycles about once every 100,000 years. The orbit changes from nearly circular to more elliptical, and then vice versa. Because of this, the distance to the Sun changes. The farther the Earth is from the Sun, the less solar radiation our planet receives. In addition, when the shape of the orbit changes, so does the length of the seasons.
2. The tilt of the earth's axis, which fluctuates between 22 and 24.5 degrees with respect to its orbit around the Sun. This cycle spans approximately 41,000 years. 22 or 24.5 degrees doesn't seem like much of a difference, but the tilt of the axis makes a big difference in how the different seasons are pronounced. The more the Earth is tilted, the greater the difference between winter and summer. The Earth's axial tilt is currently at 23.5 and is decreasing, which means that differences between winter and summer will decrease over the next thousands of years.
3. The direction of the earth's axis relative to space. The direction changes cyclically with a period of 26 thousand years.
"The combination of these three factors determines whether there are prerequisites for the onset of an ice age. It is almost impossible to imagine how these three factors interact, but with the help of mathematical models we can calculate how much solar radiation receives certain latitudes at certain times of the year, and also received in past and will receive in the future,” says Sune Rasmussen.
Summer temperatures play a particularly important role in this context. Milankovitch realized that a cold summer in the northern hemisphere was a prerequisite for the beginning of the Ice Age. 
IF THE WINTERS ARE SNOW AND MOST OF THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE covered with snow, temperatures and hours of sunshine in summer determine whether snow is allowed to remain all summer. “If the snow doesn’t melt in the summer, then little sunlight penetrates the earth. The rest is reflected back into space in a snow-white blanket. This exacerbates the cooling that began due to a change in the orbit of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun,” says Sune Rasmussen. “Further cooling brings even more snow, which further reduces the amount of absorbed heat, and so on until the ice age begins.”
Similarly, a period of hot summers leads to the end of the Ice Age. The hot sun then melts the ice enough so that sunlight can again reach surfaces like soil or the sea, which absorb it and warm the Earth.
Another factor that is relevant to the possibility of an ice age is the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Just as snow that reflects light increases the formation of ice or accelerates its melting, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 180 ppm to 280 ppm (parts per million) helped bring the Earth out of the last ice age.
However, ever since industrialization began, people have been pushing the CO2 share further all the time, so it's almost 400 ppm now.
“It took nature 7,000 years to raise the share of carbon dioxide by 100 ppm after the end of the ice age. Humans were able to do the same in just 150 years. This is important in terms of whether the Earth can enter a new ice age, and means not only that an ice age cannot begin at the moment," says Sune Rasmussen.
Scientists always talk about the ice age only in the northern hemisphere of the planet. The reason is that there is too little land in the southern hemisphere on which a massive layer of snow and ice can lie.
With the exception of Antarctica, the entire southern part of the southern hemisphere is covered with water, which does not provide good conditions for the formation of a thick ice shell.
Christian SEGREN, Videnskab, Denmark
Scientists believe that in the near future a mini-ice age will come on Earth. This is due to a decrease in solar activity.
"The sun, as it were, falls into" hibernation ". This will lead to the fact that a cooling will come around the world, which can last more than 30 years," the scientists said.
Every 11 years, a special period of the solar cycle is fixed. At this time, there is a decrease in the number of sunspots, which leads to a weakening of the energy emerging from the bowels of the Star. When the "solar minimum" is reached, the temperature on Earth will drop by about one degree, which will lead to a global worsening of the weather.
Scientists observed such a phenomenon in 1650
Then the period of reduced solar activity lasted 60 years. In Europe and North America, the air temperature dropped, which affected the glaciers. During that period, a large number of rivers and lakes completely froze.
Earth will begin a new ice age
In 2012, Pravda.Ru wrote that scientists came to the conclusion that a new ice age could begin on Earth in 15 years.
This statement was made by scientists from a British university. In their opinion, a significant decrease in solar activity has recently been observed. According to researchers, by 2020, the 24th cycle of solar activity will be completed, after which a long period of calm will begin.
Accordingly, a new ice age may begin on our planet, which has already been called the Maunder minimum, reports Planet Today. A similar process already took place on Earth in 1645-1715. Then the average air temperature dropped by 1.3 degrees, which led to the death of crops and mass starvation.
Pravda.Ru previously wrote that recently scientists were surprised to find that glaciers in the Central Asian Karakorum mountains are growing rapidly. And the point is not at all in the "spreading" of the ice cover. And in full growth, the thickness of the glacier also increases. And this despite the fact that nearby, in the Himalayas, the ice continues to melt. What is the reason for the Karakorum ice anomaly?
It should be noted that against the background of the global trend towards a reduction in the area of glaciers, the situation looks very paradoxical. The mountain glaciers from Central Asia turned out to be "white crows" (in both senses of this expression), since their area is growing at the same rate as it is decreasing elsewhere. The data obtained from the Karakoram mountain range between 2005 and 2010 completely baffled glaciologists.
Recall that the Karakorum mountain system, located at the junction of Mongolia, China, India and Pakistan (between the Pamirs and Kunlun in the north, the Himalayas and Gandishishan in the south), is one of the highest in the world. The average height of the rocky ridges of these mountains is about six thousand meters (which is more than, for example, in neighboring Tibet - there the average height is about 4880 meters). There are also several "eight-thousanders" - mountains, whose height from the foot to the top exceeds eight kilometers.
So in Karakorum, according to meteorologists, since the end of the twentieth century, snowfalls have become very plentiful. Now there they fall about 1200-2000 millimeters a year, and almost exclusively in solid form. And the average annual temperature has remained the same - in the range of five to four degrees below zero. It is not surprising that the glacier began to grow very quickly.
At the same time, in the neighboring Himalayas, according to weather forecasters, during the same years, snow began to fall significantly less. The glacier of these mountains was deprived of its main source of nutrition and, accordingly, "shrank". It is possible that the point here is a change in the paths of the snowy air masses - before they went to the Himalayas, and now they are turning to the Karakoram. But in order to confirm this assumption, it is necessary to check the situation with the glaciers of other "neighbors" - Pamir, Tibet, Kunlun and Gandishishan.
NASA has taken pictures that show: The Little Ice Age on Earth is coming soon, possibly starting as early as 2019! Is this true or the horror stories of scientists? Let's figure it out.
Are we on the edge of the end of the world?
In Russia in 2019, the winter is truly Russian, with heavy snowfalls and low temperatures. Is this the norm, or is a cold winter a harbinger of a more serious cataclysm? NASA images of the sun show that in a few years the Little Ice Age could begin on earth!
Photographs of the sun usually show dark spots on the luminary. These comparatively large spots have disappeared.
Scientists predict a Little Ice Age on Earth
Some researchers come to the conclusion that the disappearance of spots is an indicator of a decrease in solar activity. Therefore, scientists predict a "Little Ice Age" for the current year 2019.
Where are the sunspots?
This event is recorded by NASA for the fourth time this year, when the surface of the star is clean, without spots. It has been observed that the Sun's activity has been dropping much faster over the past 10,000 years.
According to meteorologist Paul Dorian, this could lead to an ice age. "Weak solar activity over a longer period of time has a cooling effect on the troposphere, which is the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere in which we all live."
Similarly, a professor at the British University of Northumbria, Valentina Zharkova, is convinced that an ice age will be observed on Earth between 2010 and 2050: “I trust our research, based on excellent mathematical calculations and data.”
The last "Little Ice Age" was in the 17th century
The sunspots disappear and look like a pendulum moving back and forth. The same thing happens with the eleven-year solar cycle, scientists explain. The last time the spots disappeared at this rate was in the 17th century.
At that time, the waters of the London Thames were covered with ice, and everywhere in Europe people were dying from lack of food, because crop failures were everywhere due to the cold. This period of low temperatures is called a "small one-off".
Scientists have long suspected that low solar activity is one of the reasons for the onset of the "Little Ice Age". That's just how exactly it occurs, physicists still can not explain.
Many historians have come to the conclusion that the Little Ice Age in the 17th century was the cause of the Time of Troubles in Russia. With severe cold and crop failures in Russia, the appearance of numerous robbers is also associated. So, for example, on the Don, at that time, hosted