Abstract
THE supplement to this week’s issue of NATURE (p. 591) consists of Sir George Simpson’s discourse at the Royal Institution on “Ice Ages”. The striking advances of great ice sheets over large areas of the globe which have occurred at long geological intervals have attracted a great deal of attention from geologists, who have described their extent, oscillations and associated phenomena in a huge volume of literature, and there has been much speculation, some of it very wild and baseless, as to their causes, but they have been little discussed from the point of view of physical meteorology. With so much ground to cover in a short time, Sir George Simpson presented the geological results in broad outline, ignored the speculations, and concentrated on the theory of variations of solar radiation as a cause of ice ages which is hiw years. It has previs own especial contribution to the subject, built up by a number of important researches during the past feously been assumed that widespread glaciation required a general fall of temperature, one cause of which might have been a decrease of solar radiation ; Sir George demonstrated on physical grounds that glaciation is more likely to result from an increase of solar radiation. Thfect on temperature, but would cause increased snowfall in high latitudes and at the same time heavy rais would have little efinfall (‘pluvial periods’) in lower latitudes. That such a paradoxical state of affairs is actually possible was shown by a simple and beautiful experiment in ice formation performed at the discourse and illustrated in the text.
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Solar Radiation as a Cause of Ice Ages. Nature 141, 588 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141588a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141588a0