Proxy data – indirect records of the Earth’s climate found in unlikely places like coral, pollen, trees, and sediments – show interesting oscillations approximately every 100,000 years starting about 1 million years ago.
Proxy data – indirect records of the Earth’s climate found in unlikely places like coral, pollen, trees, and sediments – show interesting oscillations approximately every 100,000 years starting about 1 million years ago. Strong changes in global ice volume, sea level, carbon dioxide concentration, and surface temperature indicate cycles of a long, slow transition to a glacial period and an abrupt switch to a warm and short interglacial period.
Milutin Milankovitch hypothesized that the timing of these cycles was controlled by the orbital parameters of the Earth, including the shape of its path around the sun and the tilt of the planet. A slightly closer orbit or more tilted planet could create a small increase in solar radiation and a feedback loop that leads to massive changes in climate. This idea suggests that there may be some predictability in the climate, a notoriously complex system.
In Chaos, by AIP Publishing, Stefano Pierini of Parthenope University of Naples proposed a new paradigm to simplify the verification of the Milankovitch hypothesis.
“The main motivation behind this study was the wish to characterize and illustrate the Milankovitch hypothesis in a simple, elegant, and intuitive way,” Pierini said.
Read more at American Institute of Physics
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