Earth Orbit Changes Linked To Antarctic Warming

The Earth has periodic ice ages - every 100,000 years, give or take, and the ice ages last far longer than the warm periods. In the last century, scientists determined that Earth's ice ages were determined by the wobbling of the planet's orbit, which changes its orientation to the sun and affects the amount of sunlight reaching higher latitudes, particularly the polar regions. The Northern Hemisphere's last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago and then the ice age in the Southern Hemisphere ended about 2,000 years later, suggesting that the south was responding to warming in the north.  But new research says that Antarctic warming began at least two, and perhaps four, millennia earlier than previously thought. read more

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