Shivering under a couple of inches of ice and low-teen temperatures, got me to wondering…
If a new Ice Age were to begin, how quickly would it have an impact on modern humanity?
How soon before we even knew it was upon us?
When would the glaciers begin advancing from the North?
Would it be a slow-motion catastrophe or would we see skyscrapers tumbling into the East River live on CNN? (I kid, of course not, but…)
Purely speculative of course, but do we have any good science telling us how fast the last Ice Age(s) advanced? I’m sure it wasn’t “Day After Tomorrow” insane fast, but we all have heard about the mammoths with flowers frozen in their stomachs etc. Is there any consensus on what kind of timeline we’d be looking at?
---- BTW ---- This is not a thread for Global Warming advocates/deniers, I only want to know about real Ice Age Stuff.
Ice caps don’t build up and advance suddenly. It takes tens of thousands of years. This graph shows the changes in global ice volume over the past 450,000 years. When temperatures fall, ice builds up comparatively rapidly at first, but this is still over a period of maybe 5,000 years. It would probably take the ice caps almost 100,000 years to reach the point of the their greatest advance during the last glacial maximum. In contrast, when temperatures rise, the ice caps retreat rapidly. At the end of the last glaciation, it only took a few thousand years for the ice cap to retreat from the New York area to disappear almost entirely except in Greenland.
I realize that the buildup of an icecap takes centuries…but what about the large number of frozen mammoth corpses found on the Siberian tundras? It soulds like there may well have been a series of very cold summers which resulted in widespread starvation of these animals. I once read that Tuckerman’s Ravine (on the side of Mt. Washington, NH), could grow into a substantial glaciers, in a few years-if the snow could survive therough the summers. A few years of cold summers (like 1816-the “Year Without Summer”) could do this.
As described in this TalkOriginss article, most frozen mammoths were buried in mudslides or trapped in boggy soil during wetter summers, and then became permanently frozen through contact with the permafrost during the subsequent winter. Contrary to the popular cartoon image of a frozen mammoth in an ice cube, most remains are found in frozen soil. More here on themammoth in an ice cube myth.
