Researchers Claim Next Ice Age Is No Less Than Just 10,000 Years Away, Say Carbon Emissions May Affect in Long Run

Our planet has experienced climate change for millions of years. With freezing temperatures followed by escalating global warming, it won't be too long before Earth experiences yet another Ice Age. The orbital motion of our planet will determine the changes that are about to come, according to a study authored by Stephen Barker, Lorraine E. Lisiecki, Gregor Knorr, Sophie Nuber, and Polychronis C. Tzedakis published in Science. The experts reconstructed the glacial periods over the last million years on Earth and figured that global temperatures have fluctuated for more than five decades.

However, the exact orbital parameters were not clear and the change in the direction of Earth's rotational axis was possibly the reason behind the changes, according to PHYS ORG. The team also looked into a million-year record of climate change on our planet​ that had details about the changes in the size of the ice-covered land structures spread across the Northern Hemisphere and the fluctuation of temperature in the deep ocean. "We found a predictable pattern over the past million years for the timing of when Earth's climate changes between glacial 'ice ages' and mild warm periods like today, called interglacials," Lisiecki, a professor from the University of California Santa Barbara, said in a statement.

"We were amazed to find such a clear imprint of the different orbital parameters on the climate record," lead author Barker, a professor at Cardiff University, added. "It is quite hard to believe that the pattern has not been seen before." The team observed a repeating pattern in the climate that was consistent with the orbital changes. "The pattern we found is so reproducible that we were able to make an accurate prediction of when each interglacial period of the past million years or so would occur and how long each would last," Barker said, per IFL Science. "This is important because it confirms the natural climate change cycles we observe on Earth over tens of thousands of years are largely predictable and not random or chaotic."

Tzedakis, a professor at University College London, stated that humans are currently living in an interglacial period called the Holocene. They were also about to predict when our planet's climate will start switching back to a glacial state. "But such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years’ time is very unlikely to happen because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural course, with longer-term impacts into the future,” co-author Knorr from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, explained.

The group of researchers used a combination of climate model simulations to quantify the absolute effects of human-made climate change into the far future. "Now we know that climate is largely predictable over these long timescales, we can actually use past changes to inform us about what could happen in the future," Barker added. "This is something we couldn't do before with the level of confidence that our new analysis provides. This is vital for better informing the decisions we make now about greenhouse gas emissions, which will determine future climate changes."