[Perspective] The smoking gun of the ice ages
Thursday, December 8, 2016 - 15:11
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Forty years ago, Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton in a paper in Science tested the hypothesis that small changes in Earth's orbital geometry—namely precession, obliquity, and eccentricity—were responsible for the waxing and waning of the great continental ice sheets during the Quaternary period, which began about 2.58 million years ago (1). The paper is considered to be the “smoking gun” in support of the astronomical hypothesis of the Ice Ages, which is over a century old and most often ascribed to Milutin Milankovitch (2). Author: David A. Hodell