The Ice Age a terrible reality in earth’s history has never touched man, for we lived and evolved during a period of unusually calm weather. But an Ice Age could wipe out life as we know it and a super Ice Age could wipe out all life. A scientist in my country had warned this would happen. His diligent and heartbreaking work over a period of 30 years had established beyond doubt in his mind that an ice age was imminent in the very near future. Unfortunately, nobody took him seriously.
As the Earth moves through space, it is subjected not just to variations in the length and shape of its orbit but also to rhythmic shifts in its angle of orientation to the sun – all affecting the duration and intensity of sunlight falling on any patch of land. These changes in position over long periods of time are related to the comings and goings of ice ages. This was discovered by the Serbian academic named Milutin Milanovitch in 1930 after decades of painstaking calculations, though like most people he theorized that it was the gradual increase in harsh winters that led to these long spells of coldness. Unfortunately, the process was more subtle and rather more unnerving than that. For the cause of ice ages is to be found not in brutal winters but cool summers. If summers are too cool to melt all the snow that falls on a given area, more incoming sunlight is bounced back by the reflective surface, exacerbating the cooling effect and encouraging more snow to fall. The consequence would tend to be self-perpetuating. Therefore it is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow however little lasts. So an ice age could start from a single unseasonable summer. If this happens, the process is self-enlarging, unstoppable, and devastating for as the ice sheet grows it would move as an advancing glacier.
But what all scientists had ignored was a drop in solar radiation of 5.7 percent that this scientist said had occurred over the past decade, which would lead he warned to cool summers, unmelted ice and a situation where the Earth loses its ability to hold on to its heat. Unfortunately, he was a loser who came from a tiny island in the Indian Ocean so nobody took him seriously. He was also an eccentric man unable or unwilling to play politics which less able scientists played. So while more socially adept scientists became famous he faded and died.
In the year 2054, the United States split into eight, being a land of machines there was utter chaos when the machines stopped moving. Due to the unbearable winter, most people in Canada moved south and the people already there faced untold hardships. The Antarctic was abandoned and Alaska was lost forever. In the Arctic Eskimos who had forgotten their old ways of living were trapped. Most people in northern latitudes faced unbearable winters and many tried to move south. In the Southern latitudes, the situation was even worse. It seemed hundreds of millions of people were trying to desperately reach the equator. There was starvation everywhere. Although nuclear weapons were used to try to stop the advancing glaciers they made almost no impact.
(To be continued)
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