I just had an idea half an hour ago and I’m still in shock and trying to process it and figure out whether it is true.
First, I need to explain the conventional model of the ice ages.
Basically, as the planet became dryer (since circa 65My ago) and the amount of buffers (CO2 and others) in the atmosphere was reduced, the seasonality of the climate became more extreme, and the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles more extreme. This part is not questionable. At one point in time, the planet got so cool that ice remained on the poles around the year, and this is formally known as the ice age. This, too, is not questionable.
According to the conventional model, in the ice age the climate became so sensitive to small variations in Earth orbit and tilt, due to the critical lack of climate buffers in the atmosphere, that those small variations became sufficient to throw the planet into a glacial maximum, also known as the “ice age” in common understanding. The geological epoch defined by alterations between glacial minimums and maximums is known as the Pleistocene, and it began circa 2.5My ago. It is usually, but wrongly claimed that it ended 17Ky ago, but this is merely the time when we entered the current glacial minimum. There is no reason to assume any change in the geological and astronomical underlying causes of the Pleistocene climate alterations.
Also, according to the conventional model, the ice age is a northern-hemisphere phenomenon; not much changes in the South. In the North, however, the entire North America is covered by glaciers, Europe is covered by glaciers, and, paradoxically, Siberia was warm enough to be the pasture of the vast megafauna. At some point, however, things very suddenly changed, and the mammoths in Siberia were frozen so instantly, the enzymes in their digestion couldn’t cause the meat to spoil, which means it happened within hours, and to temperatures of around -70°C, which is about the worst weather that happens in Siberia to this day. In Europe and especially in North America, the vast glaciers melted during this transitional period, which eventually caused the global water levels to rise by about 80 meters. This seems to be remembered worldwide by mankind as the great flood, since this massive sea rise took place in the timeframe of less than a year. Discovery of the suddenness of the global melt was quite a shock in the scientific circles, but I don’t know why they were so surprised; I watched the snow and ice melt in the spring, and it’s always a very sudden thing, regardless of the amount of snow. Simply, when it gets warm enough, the snow just collapses, regardless of the fact that it appeared to be an eternal constant of nature only yesterday.
What shocked me today is an idea – I can’t say how true it is – that there might actually be no glacial minimum or maximum, and that it’s merely an artefact of sea and air currents in the northern hemisphere. In one configuration, the one we have today, the polar vortex destabilizes in such a way that it allows the cold arctic air to flow all the way across the Northern America, and for some reason, probably due to a weakened gulf stream, the north of Europe freezes as well, and the glaciers form all the way down to Slovenia. However, this change of polar vortex configuration means that the cold air stops freezing the plains of Northern Asia in the winter, and the climate there becomes quite moderate, which would normally be expected since Vladivostok is at the same geographic latitude as Madrid, and would be expected to have similar climate. For some reason, the cold air flooding North America is combined with great humidity, probably due to to warm sea currents in the Pacific north-west, which creates enormous amounts of snowfall, sufficient to gradually shift lots of water from the ocean to the extended northern ice caps and glaciers. There is no analogous phenomenon in Siberia, which makes the difference in the amount of continental glaciation (wet cold vs. dry cold). This continental glaciation increases the Earth’s albedo, and thus promotes reflection of sunlight into space, creating a global cooling feedback that allows the ice and snow to remain across the year. If the process is significant enough, and perhaps combined with other factors, it promotes absorption of CO2 in sea water, which is accelerated at low temperatures. If this process is significant enough, it reduces the amount of buffers in the atmosphere. If this reaches a critical point, you get a stable glacial maximum, which persists until something changes significantly enough to start the sudden global melt and initiate the glacial minimum.
So, the question might be what those initial conditions are, with the sea and air currents, that allow the polar vortex to destabilize over North America in the first place? The second question is, what are the conditions that make this a consistent enough phenomenon, and the third question is what are the conditions that make it a permanent state in the 100Ky range?
I don’t see any obvious errors in my analysis, and I would welcome feedback.
When you say that there might actually be no glacial minimum or maximum, what exactly do you mean by glacial minimum and maximum? That minimum and maximum are not points where some constraint is hit and that reverses the process, but simply a point in time where several forces interact in a way that the vector starts going in the opposite direction?
I mean that there’s the expectation that there’s the “ice age” that is colder than the interglacial, and that might not be how things work, because it might just be that the “cold” is distributed differently around the northern hemisphere (Siberia being moderate and pleasant, and North America being a frozen glacier), and the excess of ice is just the artefact of moisture happening to be where the cold is, which then introduces more albedo and basically extracts lots of water from the oceans, lowering the level by 80 meters or so. But other than that, the “ice age” might be basically the same thing as this, just the gulf stream going out, and perhaps something else redirecting.
Edit: what I want to say is that the expectation is that glaciation starts when, due to some orbital parameter, Earth gets colder, or there is less sunlight, or whatever, and then there keeps being more ice at the end of each winter, until you get a runaway albedo effect.
What my model allows is a paradox where you can actually have a warmer Earth that causes a glacial maximum, under certain conditions, such as warmth interfering with the sea currents, or causing enough polar ice to melt and inhibit the thermohaline circulation, thus inhibiting the exchange of heat between the equator and the poles, and causing an almost instant freeze. This freeze, in turn, can cause accelerated absorption of CO2 into the oceans, reducing the amount of buffers, and thus making it less likely for the planet to emerge from the freeze. That part is something I don’t understand well, and I’m missing something important. Working on it, though.
Oh shit, I just thought of something, but I don’t have my books with me here so I can’t really check and I don’t trust the online sources enough, but there seems to be a problem with the ice cores where the CO2 concentration is correlated with the glacial and interglacial phases, but not the way one would expect; it’s somewhat shifted in phase, and I would really want to check whether CO2 concentration is elevated prior to the glacial phase, and then drops like a rock with a time delay. My model would expect the CO2 concentration to lag slightly behind temperature when the temperature goes down, basically there’s something that drops the temperature, and then it takes a while for the ocean to absorb the atmospheric CO2.
According to this low-resolution graphs which are combined into a single even lower resolution comparison here, it would appear to me that you’re right, CO2 lags after temperature drops. The latter article, however, states that one does not necessarily preclude the other.
As for your first question on what could allow polar vortex to destabilize over North America, Wikipedia says:
This is what’s been happening this year actually from what I gather, check out this article for example.
EDIT: corrected last link.
Actually, they had several very similar events in the timespan of several years, to the point where it became a noticeable pattern. When the first one struck, I thought “wait a minute, this looks exactly like the North American glaciation pattern during the last maximum”, but I didn’t have enough information to proceed further along this line of thinking. My subconscious mind has been “nagging” me with hints about the ice age being the actual danger for quite a while now, so this probably means there *is* sufficient information to recognize a pattern, but I just haven’t been able to put all the pieces together on the conscious level.
I can follow your logic somewhat, but I don’t really know enough about climate to be able to assign probabilities to possible outcomes. If we are really approaching glaciation event, even if it’s only in part of the world, what timeframe do you consider likely for any of this to become a significant factor?
That’s just the thing – it’s hard to tell, because we basically know very little about the glaciation process; the scientific understanding of it was thoroughly revised during my lifetime, and in the recent decades everybody was on the “global warming” train so the research of the mechanisms of Pleistocene was neglected, to say the least. That’s why I can’t rely on the scientists and have to use the known data and make my own models, doing the simulations in my head. Most of it overwhelms me almost instantly, resulting in chaos of fluid mechanics. When I rely on intuition, the “hunch” consistently states that “global warming” might produce a sudden glaciation event, but only recently, with several years where at the same time the permafrost in Siberia showed signs of melting (those deep methane craters), and polar vortex collapse consistently froze North America in patterns I haven’t seen before, started me thinking that we might actually be there already.
The common understanding of the glaciation/melt pattern is that the onset of the ice age is slow, and the melt is quick, but I looked at the temperature graphs from the Vostok cores and none of that looks linear to me. If anything, the scenario from that “The day after tomorrow” movie, with extremely sudden glaciation due to thermohaline circulation collapse doesn’t look that crazy; sudden events are possible, and they can reduce the global temperature rapidly in the melt phase, or raise the temperature in the glaciation phase, due to the complexity of the actual thermodynamics on the ground, with all the hot and cold accumulators and shifting interaction patterns between thermal zones and between fluids.
So, what’s the timeframe? From “we’re there already; America freezing during the winter, the gulf stream weakening and the Siberia meting, that’s what one would expect from the glaciation patterns, it just takes some time to get established” to “glaciation is a gradual process and it might take hundreds of years for the new pattern to establish itself strongly enough” to “our technology is for the most part so poorly suited for temperature extremes, and one sudden and very harsh climate event might fatally and irreversibly disrupt the technological civilization”. Imagine -70°C temperatures in North America and parts of Europe during the winter, with meters of snow, and then floods in the spring, and then you get a statistical freak event such as that Tambora eruption that created the year without summer in 1816, right on top of a polar vortex event. Looks like a freak event but that’s exactly how massive extinction events happen. It’s usually not one thing, but several very bad luck events converging at the same time.
Now when you mention The Day After Tomorrow, I’ve been wondering what’s happening with the Gulf Stream, trying to find some newer data, and found this nice collection of graphs: https://www.severe-weather.eu/global-weather/gulf-stream-amoc-circulation-collapse-freshwater-imbalance-usa-europe-fa/
The article explains it well and it’s nothing new – if the flow of the Gulf Stream is disrupted, Europe gets colder, and North American east coast gets warmer, and more importantly, that means more hurricanes and more extreme weather. But the data is more interesting – seems like the effect is becoming exponential in recent years, especially in the last decade or so. Graph plotting the differences between east coast and North Atlantic:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9224299a794c3d989f552a2989cd0668cb44b11a99fbf8c4104c1ec4ef39d218.png
While this may reverse at any point for any reason, it’s very hard to predict effects of exponential trends, and the difference between last two decades is striking. If the trend continues, the next decade could be even bigger outlier than the previous one.
I probably formulated my idea wrongly, because it’s not that there is no difference between glacial and interglacial, but that there is no difference in how “warm” or “cold” Earth is, because it seems to be mostly about the distribution of heat and moisture between Eurasia and North America. Basically, if you come to Irkutsk or Verhoyansk during winter, you will understand that the ice age never went away, it just shifted. Basically, Vladivostok is at the same latitude as the south of France. So, it’s not that the Earth moves to a colder orbit or that the Sun doesn’t irradiate it as much; it’s just that the sea and air currents shift for some reason and since the northern hemisphere’s climate is extremely dependent on heat transfer from the equator, the consequences of any change there are huge. But sure, on the longer time scale, we are in a cold, dry, low-buffer climate mode. The low-buffer part seems to have been somewhat mitigated by industrial means, though, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate consequences of that will be, but global warming is not something I would be worried about. We are far too deep at the cold end of the scale.