Science Daily - Ice Ages, Warmings Global Phenomena, Glacial Studies Show

Glacial Records Depict Ice Age Climate In Synch Worldwide

MADISON - "An answer to the long-standing riddle of whether the Earth's ice ages occurred simultaneously in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres is emerging from the glacial deposits found in the high desert east of the Andes.

Using a new technique to gauge the effects of cosmic rays on minerals found in boulders carried by South American glaciers thousands of years ago, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has demonstrated that the Earth's most recent ice ages were global events, likely driven by change in the atmosphere.

The work, reported in the current (March/April) issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, a leading earth science journal, is important because it reveals that ice ages were global in nature, a fact scientists had trouble determining due to the difficulty of precisely dating the jumble of debris - sand, gravel, clay, boulders - that ice age glaciers leave in their wakes. The new work suggests that ice ages were worldwide phenomena due, in part, to the sluggish redistribution of solar energy through the world's oceans punctuated by repeated, rapid cooling of the Earth's atmosphere.

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The results are significant because they indicate that the whole Earth experiences major ice age cold periods at the same time, and thus, some climate forcing mechanism must homogenize the Earth's climate system during ice ages and, by inference, other periods," says Michael R. Kaplan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh who conducted the work in a postdoctoral position at UW-Madison."

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040319071426.htm