Do you think that we could be heading into another ice age in the near future? Reply back with answers!
I very much doubt that any new ice age will arrive in time to affect this board in any major way. But I did report the post so a mod can move it to a more suitable forum for ya.
Welcome to the SDMB, rawensley. I’m moving your post to our General Questions forum. I’m not sure if there’s a definitive answer to your question, so if the mods decide it’s more of a debate, they can move it to Great Debates.
Technically, we’re still in an ice age. We’re currently in an interglacial period; no word on when to expect a return of the ice sheets.
Global warming, global schwarming.
Answers!
when come back bring them.
My lame attempt at being funny. Figured someone would call me on it.
So if we’re looking for an answer to “Do you think we could be heading into another ice age in the near future?”
If we’re talking about my future? No. In the planet’s future? Yes.
The geologic record show that glacials and interglacials can happen surprisingly quickly. It seems that there’s some sort of positive feedback mechanism at work, and once a glacial gets started it tends to keep on going until we have large ice sheets, and once an interglacial gets started it tends to keep going until the ice sheets are melted.
And so around 10,000 years ago the ice sheets that covered Canada and Northern Europe started to melt, and they kept on melting until the only continental ice sheets in the Northern hemisphere are in Greenland.
One theory is that the rapid changes are due to the gulf stream. Warm and sunny Madrid is at the same latitude as chilly New York City. If the gulf stream shut down then suddenly all of Europe is going to get several degrees colder. That means more snow, more snow means higher albedo, higher albedo means more sunlight reflected back into space, which means colder, which means more snow, which means higher albedo…you see how this might work.
And then if the gulf stream gets re-established, the opposite happens. A blast of warmth starts to melt the ice, which means lower albedo, which means warmer, which means more melting, and so on.
I expect an ice age geologically soon.
I expect no ice age for me.
Yes, almost certainly we will have another ice age. Several I should think. The devil, however, is in the details. We could be talking about thousands or even tens of thousands of years from now…or, we could have one kick off this century (if the conditions were right, i.e. lower out put from the sun, a series of really massive volcano’s, a really big rock smashing into the earth, etc etc). Right now, as others have pointed out, we are in an interglacial period where the trend is warming, not cooling…but to paraphrase a quote about the weather in Chicago, wait around a bit as it’s sure to change.
-XT
I have to add nuclear winter.
Ditto. 
Well, my question would be, was there any ice cover during non-Ice Age periods (randomly selected: the Silurian, the Lower Cretaceous, the Oligocene)? What was the ice cover during the three (or four?) interglacials of the Pleistocene? During the interstadials during glaciations? We could more easily assess the probable future if we had this data.
Information I have at hand: Antarctica has been ice covered for at least five and likely fifteen million years. The Greenland icecap has been present throiugh at least one interglacial, since it’s well over 100,000 years old. But I don’t have any hard figures on how old from reputable sources. Then you have the minor remnant caps, like Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, and permanent sea ice cover. Were there perennial caps during the interstadials on the Canadian Rockies, the Jotunheimen range in Norway, the Alps, the mountains of northern Siberia? During the interglacials?
One datum I found interesting is that immediately prior to the major Pleistocene ice advances, the Arctic Ocean was ‘open’ – without permanent ice covering most of its surface, as it hs been during recorded history. This counterintuitive concept becomes logical when oone realizes that little moisture is picked up from the atmosphere from ice – it is for climatic purposes a cold desert. Hence adjoining areas of land do not get snow condensing from water vapor evaporated off the ice, for the most part (though certainly they do get snow from other moisture-laden cold air). But if the Arctic is open water, then wind and wave throw up spindrift, sunlight evaporate a little water, and the cold air becomes saturated with such water vapor as it cn hold, whnich it promptly dumps when moving over land. I don’t wish to play Chicken Little – there are plenty enough of them around without my help – but the recent meltback in the Beaufort Sea and surrounding Arctic waters greatly concerns me for that reason.
I’m going to take the single permitted bump here, because there are a few questions that deserve answers in this thread, which has dropped off the front page.
Very little chance, thanks to global warming. Another advance of the glaciers may well not happen in the lifetime of the humans species; there’s speculation that we may already be headed out of our present climate into a new warmer climate that will last for millions of years. One warmer than humans have ever lived in.
Well, parts of Antarctica have been. But parts of Canada have also. That doesn’t make it correct to say that Canada has been ice covered for at least five and likely fifteen million years.
As recently as 1 Million years ago Antarctica supported broadleafed beech forests and vast areas of herbland/grassland. It certainly wasn’t covered in ice, although there was extensive glacial coverage and ice sheets in the southern uplands. IOW it was more like modern Canada than modern Antarctica.