New Evidence We Are Entering An Ice Age Termination Event - EXPLAINED

This video is brought to you by Squarespace In 2006, researchers first detected a strange spike in the amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere, a greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide, as the scientific community raced to explain the cause. sudden increase they found, to their surprise, that for once at least did not coincide with any relative increase in human use of fossil fuels. It seemed as if overnight a large new source of methane had simply triggered something that was happening on a global scale, but no one could determine what was actually causing these methane spikes to occur. every 100,000 years or so and are generally an indication of an Ice Age ending

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: a rapid warming at the end of an ice age that in just a couple of decades sees the planet go from being largely covered by ice to the climate we experience today, but the last. one only occurred 12,000 years ago at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, so why are we seeing another methane surge so soon and what is causing it? 16 years later, as the peak continues to grow year after year, are we on track for a major climate reversal?

This is a topic I find absolutely fascinating, it is rare that we find such predominant irrefutable proof of something happening on a global scale that fundamentally does not We understand and that it is not the result of our direct impact on the planet either. To answer the question of what is really happening here we need to understand some of the history of the planet and its climate. Currently we are in the Quaternary period which spans from approximately 2.58 million years ago to the present day. The Quaternary period has been divided into two different eras the first is the Teina place Era from approximately 2 and a half million years ago until 11,700 years ago and was known for its cyclical ice ages where during periods of glaciation vast sheets of ice would expand to cover much of America of the North, northern Europe and Asia. then, after several tens of thousands of years, they would retreat for a few thousand years to a period of warmer global climate.

The pine also underwent important evolutionary developments and migrations for humans, for example, Homo erectus arose in the early years of the pine and the modern atomically analogue. Homo Sapien appeared later in the era and

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ually colonized most of the planet. The pine also witnessed the foral mega-extinctions where many large animals such as Willy's mammoths, mastadons and saber-toothed cats eventually became extinct. This was partly due to pressures from human hunting, but was mainly thought to be driven by significant climate changes that could have altered habitats and food sources in many of the megaforal species as the planet made the transition to your second Epoch, the hollene, we have had one, yes, what about the second Epoch from about 12,000 years ago to the present?

The day marks the most recent period in which glaciers have retreated and the planet has seen relatively stable and warm weather conditions. This is where the terminology becomes. I think a little confusing, technically we are still in an ice age, just an ice age where the glaciers don't. They cover as much of the planet as they can, we call this period the interglacial period. 50 million years ago, the planet was too hot for ice to form at the poles, so related to that, the Earth is definitely still in an ice age in the most recent one. The Hollen era is important for human history, since the stable and comparatively warm climate allowed the development of agriculture and, consequently, the growth of large human settlements and complex societies that obviously culminated in the creation of social networks. , the transition that took us out of the holos scene and out of all glacial to interglacial periods are called Ice Age ending events.

Again, we are still in the Ice Age. Yes, it's confusing, these

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events are generally made up of three distinct phases, although exactly the demarcations between each phase vary by researcher. Actually, we are talking about the first phase: it is called deglacial onset: its slow but steady rise in global temperatures marks the beginning of the end of the glacial period. It generally lasts several tens of thousands of years. This is often driven by changes in Earth's orbit called malanovic. Cycles: These predominantly relate to the angle or orbit of the Earth around the Sun, starting with eccentricity, it describes the Earth's orbit around the Sun and measures how much the orbital path deviates from a perfect circle.

This can range from zero, it's a perfect circle, to about 0.067. It's more of an oval or ellipse currently, the eccentricity is around 0.017, so we are quite circular in our orbital nature when the Earth's orbit is more elliptical, although the difference in solar energy the Earth receives is It's called isolation, which is a word I have to look at. every time I need it between the closest approach and the most distant can vary enormously this effect has a periodicity of approximately 100,000 years and during the last 800,000 years for which we have data from the ice records, the

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events have been quite good aligned with this cycle leading to major glacial to interglacial changes about 100,000 years apart, but we actually don't think this particular factor is the predominant milankovich factor of a termination event when the Earth rotates around the Sun and is tilted at an angle of 23.5.

° but over time this ranges from about 22.1 to about 24.5 over a period of 41,000 years from minimum to maximum or about 82,000 years for a complete swing from 21° up and then down again when the inclination is greater. What this does is exposes a larger polar region and means it receives more solar radiation during the summer, which can ultimately lead to faster melting of the ice sheets. This in turn can have several feedback effects on the global climate if these events are observed over the past 800,000 years. It can be seen that there is a huge correlation between the time at which they occur and the time at which a climate event is triggered. ending of the Ice Age.

Today, the tilt of the axis is decreasing from its maximum value and is moving toward the lower end of the range that should theoretically reduce the amount of melting effects on the ice sheets. The final effect I want to talk about is the procession of the wobble of the Earth's axis and affects the timing of the seasons in relation to the position of the Earth's orbit around the Sun in which this cycle of possession operates. time scales of approximately 19,000 to 23,000 years and again we see a fairly regular alignment between these events and the termination events. It's obviously not perfect, although it appears to be a combination of all of these factors working together that really drives a termination event to initiate these three.

Malanovic factors drive a feedback loop that further spreads warming of the planet as ice begins to melt. The darker surfaces of the ocean or land are exposed. These darker surfaces absorb sunlight better, leading to greater heating and more melting as the process continues. The Earth enters a period of rapid warming called total deglaciation with a significant increase in ice melting and a corresponding rise in sea levels over a very short period, usually within a matter of decades. This process is driven by the rapid release of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane that were previously dissolved in cold oceans or melting permafrost ice sheets, the release of these gases causes further warming, accelerating the process and often driving the reorganization and strengthening of ocean currents that serve to distribute heat more evenly around the planet.

Only after this second phase of rapid warming will global temperatures begin to stabilize marking the beginning of an interglacial period, which is the period we are in now, these ice sheets will also stabilize and begin to reduce their size and levels. of the sea will broadly reach some level of equilibrium while the system is still influenced by ongoing effects of increasing greenhouse gases Milanovich cycles negative feedback loops begin to play a more important role, for example, as As temperatures rise, vegetation growth in previously ice-covered areas acts as a carbon sink that absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere on a longer time scale. on land can then begin to draw in atmospheric CO2 and lock it in sediments and deposits while also equilibrating with the now warmer oceans, all of which serves to stabilize CO2 and temperature levels in the atmosphere.

This is the phase we are in now. Find the interglacial period So why did we start to see this huge increase in methane starting in 2006 that we would normally only see in the deglaciation phases of an Ice Age ending event? It's only been 12,000 years since the last one, not the usual 100,000 years we normally see between the two of us what's going on, but first I have to thank today's sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is the reason I am where I am today. It sounds overly dramatic, but it's absolutely true. I launched my first company to help scientists start new companies. about their scientific advancements Having an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use website builder to build a strong brand to communicate a mission was a centerpiece that made our teams differentiate themselves and look like professional, investment-ready companies.

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Creating a personal or team website is a great place to start. Head to squarespace.com Dr. Ben Miles to save 10% on your first website or domain purchase using the code Dr. Ben miles thank you Squarespace for existing now let's get back to the video even though human emissions skyrocketed in the 1980s When the natural gas industry boomed in the 1990s these levels had stabilized the 2006 findings sparked a wave of research to find the source of why methane suddenly started rising again, this turns out to be something reasonably difficult to achieve. . Methane is a hydrocarbon and is one of the main components of natural gas.

Methane is produced naturally in wetland ocean geological processes such as ventilation and obviously through other biological processes where generally cow farts are most to blame: methane generally remains in the atmosphere for about a decade before being decomposed predominantly by hydroxy radicals to form CO2 and water, while the lifetime of methane is much shorter compared to something like CO2. has a much higher warming potential for a couple of reasons: methane's bonds and structure are very effective at absorbing and emitting heat by infrared radiation, specifically at a wavelength of about 3.5 and 8 microns, that band of 3.5 and 8 microns also lies in an atmospheric window that can generally make its way clear into space, while CO2 is absorbed around the 4 and 15 micron wavebands that the atmosphere already absorbs effectively, This makes methane's contribution to the greenhouse effect much more pronounced.

In recent years, we have gotten significantly better at detecting where methane is located. They actually come from both Earth and space, since measuring it from satellites, not from leaks from space, there are a few ways to do it passively and actively, but I want to talk about one that I think is particularly interesting: shooting a laser on the ground, if you choose a laser wavelength of 3.5 or 8 microns in the infrared, the ground looks a bit like a mirror and actually a lot of this light bounces off the ground and asmall fraction of it makes its way.

Return to the sky to your satellite by sweeping the laser over the ground. If you suddenly see a lot less laser light coming back at you, you know it must have been absorbed and most likely it has been absorbed by methane because there's really nothing else in that band. absorbs those wavelengths, this can help you create a map of methane levels around the planet in a methane search I saw, teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory detected a plume of methane at least 3 miles deep long in the sky over an Iranian landfill, this new finding The super emitter is pumping around 18,700 lb or 8,500 kg of methane into the air every hour - that's a lot, but interestingly it pales in comparison to a group of 12 super emitters detected in Turkmenistan , all of them associated with oil and gas infrastructure, and some of them.

The plumes are up to 20 M long and together add about 111,000 lb or 50,000 kg of methane to Earth's atmosphere every hour, but these are reasonably recent events. The most recent findings were published in Global Biog Geochemical Cycles, which is a tidbit that points to methane emissions. increased from tropical and wetland regions as rising temperatures and CO2 levels have driven faster growth, this has meant that when trees and plants grow and then die and begin to decompose, it generates greater methane release rate. We have already talked about this, but also about permafrost. The regions store large amounts of carbon estimated to be about twice what currently exists in the atmosphere, but also contain trapped organic material such as permafrost.

Thor, the organic material within it begins to decompose and also releases methane and more CO2 similarly, while many modern landfills have methane capture systems, not all of the methane is captured and some is released into the atmosphere. The methane detection technology I described above is actually being deployed in both oil and gas infrastructure and landfills to help better map leaks and collect emerging methane. from scratch and I would like to say that this is because we care about the environment and the climate, but actually I think the strongest motivator is that if you can stop the leaks, you save money or if you can capture the methane that comes up from the ground , you can pump it into a gas power plant and burn it to produce electricity and then sell that electricity to the grid to make money by literally turning a pile of hot garbage into cash and yes this also generates CO2 by burning methane but that's the less than two greenhouse gases are emitted, so what does all this really mean for us, although agriculture and waste sources have increased between 2006? and 2022 will account for about half of the methane increase we see, the other half of the recent growth in methane emissions is thought to be driven by natural biogenic processes, especially the wetland feedback loop, and although the increase in emissions Global biogenic methane is produced within the period of several centuries. historical emissions range, meaning it is not totally unusual that the planet could be producing this level of methane.

The speed and acceleration of this most recent trend is extreme by all historical standards, even during the post-19th century surge driven by the use of fossil fuels, this component of methane. The current change is likely outside of anything nature has done before, at least in recent history, all of which is to say it's not that we can't explain the rise in methane. We are becoming more and more sophisticated in understanding where exactly it is emitted from, it is more than that. We don't know which line this trend will follow and if we are not the ones producing methane directly, but nature itself, it is potentially much more difficult to slow down, interfere or stop this process, capturing methane is really difficult even compared to capturing Co CO2. of the air, this is partly because methane is about 200 times less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2.

There are some approaches where I've seen things like zeolites, which are porous minerals that can convert methane into CO2, this approach and others like it. Although they are largely underexplored because CO2 production is not a very useful by-product at the moment, but if it means that less potent greenhouse gases are emerging into the atmosphere, some development in this area could really be worth it. Sorry, the question remains: what is driving the change? In our biomes that has led to this massive production of methane and will it slow down or get worse? The second question is what this really means for our planet and the honest answer is that we really don't know the only thing we have. compare it to past Ice Age ending events as a sort of proxy for what might be happening here, but this isn't an ending event driven by the usual mechanisms, so we're totally off the mark in terms of what what that really means and what it could be.

This is expected to happen here if we are in a termination-like event, given that we are in an interglacial period at the time the glaciers are already receding, could this take us out of an Ice Age entirely at this time, like I said, really not? We do not know, in the words of the researchers of the most recent study, that it is still possible that the current growth of methane is within the range of sacred variability, but it is also possible that this change could indicate a large-scale reorganization of the natural climate and the biosphere that is already underway.

On the go, just one pandemic or just a handful of financial crises left you wanting more termination-like events in your life. I just made a video about NASA's work to divert asteroid destruction away from the city. You can watch it here if you like this type of content. please consider subscribing or if you like this video leave a like to support the channel if you think scientists are rock stars grab a t-shirt like this this one is of Marie Cury looking cool and witchy the link will be on the description below until next time thanks for watching bye