Dust on Ice Sheets = End of Glaciation

I’m still working my way through this but:

“The role of dust in terminations of Ice Ages is probably far more important than many realize. It appears likely that unusually high dust levels coupled to sharply rising solar intensity at high latitudes was a major factor in initiating termination of Ice Ages. As Palmer put it, layers of buried dust probably sustained the evolution of the interglacial period.”

Dust deposition on ice sheets: a mechanism for termination of ice ages?

And if that is true, what about the dust at the end of the 1920s leading to the big temperature increase in the 1930s. Or the soot from the massive expansion of coal burning power plants and diesel cars/trucks?

 

4 thoughts on “Dust on Ice Sheets = End of Glaciation

    1. It’s also at a very high of incidence to the solar radiation even in summer, so I suspect that change in the Earth’s axial tilt may have a great deal to do with it too.

  1. The following graph (C14 proxy for ssn) shows that 9,000 (and perhaps similarly before that period too) the Sun had it’s largest solar grand maximum of the Holocene (nearly twice larger, in duration, than the grand maximum of the XX century)

    from this article,
    http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/344

    Having in sight the fast rise of temperatures in the XX century and the greater obliquity of Earth’s orbit around the Sun 10k years ago, it’s not surprising that repeated solar grand maximums that lasted for 1-2 centuries would “quickly” melt all glaciers and raise temperatures very fast.
    The following graph shows the rise of temperatures at the end of the last glacial period (the final rise into Holocene levels was quite fast)

    from
    http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html

    The C14 graph suggests that the *normal solar activity* (in terms of ssn) during the Holocene is *much lower* than what happened in the XX century.
    In addition, because Earth’s obliquity is decreasing and will continue to do so for *a few thousand years*, we should be preparing for the new glacial period, not global warming.

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