Ice Ages: Solving the MysteryHarvard University Press, 1986 - Всего страниц: 224 This book tells the exciting story of the ice ages--what they were like, why they occurred, and when the next one is due. The solution to the ice age mystery originated when the National Science Foundation organized the CLIMAP project to study changes in the earth's climate over the past 700,000 years. One of the goals was to produce a map of the earth during the last ice age. Scientists examined cores of sediment from the Indian Ocean bed and deciphered a continuous history for the past 500,000 years. Their work ultimately confirmed the theory that the earth's irregular orbital motions account for the bizarre climatic changes which bring on ice ages. This is a tale of scientific discovery and the colorful people who participated: Louis Agassiz, the young Swiss naturalist whose geological studies first convinced scientists that the earth has recently passed through an ice age; the Reverend William Buckland, an eccentric but respected Oxford professor who fought so hard against the ice-age theory before accepting it; James Croll, a Scots mechanic who educated himself as a scientist and first formulated the astronomic theory of ice ages; Milutin Milankovitch, the Serbian mathematician who gave the astronomic theory its firm quantitative foundation; and the many other astronomers, geochemists, geologists, paleontologists, and geophysicists who have been engaged for nearly a century and a half in the pressing search for a solution to the ice-age mystery. |
Содержание
Louis Agassiz and the Glacial Theory | 19 |
The Triumph of the Glacial Theory | 33 |
Exploring the IceAge World | 47 |
The IceAge Problem | 61 |
Birth of the Astronomical Theory | 69 |
The Astronomical Theory of James Croll | 77 |
Debate Over Crolls Theory | 89 |
Through Distant Worlds and Times | 97 |
Pulsebeat of Climate | 153 |
Climatic history recorded in a Czechoslovakian brickyard | 155 |
The 100000year pulse of climate | 157 |
Pacemaker of the Ice Ages | 161 |
The Rosetta Stone of late Pleistocene climate | 165 |
Climate of the past halfmillion years | 169 |
Changes in eccentricity tilt and precession | 170 |
Spectrum of climatic variation over the past halfmillion years | 171 |
The Milankovitch Controversy | 113 |
Theoretical succession of European ice ages | 116 |
Eberls test of the Milankovitch theory | 118 |
Fluctuations of the icesheet margin between Indiana and Quebec | 122 |
The Deep and the Past | 123 |
Fossil from the deepsea floor | 130 |
Succession of Caribbean ice ages according to Ericson and Emiliani | 132 |
Pleistocene Temperatures | 135 |
Milankovitch Revival | 141 |
Reef terraces on New Guinea | 145 |
Astronomical theory of Barbados sea levels | 146 |
Signal from the Earth | 147 |
Magnetic history of the earth | 150 |
The Coming Ice Age | 177 |
Climate of the past 10000 years | 179 |
Climate of the past 100 years | 180 |
Climate of the past 1000 years | 181 |
The Argentière glacier today and in 1850 | 182 |
Climatic forecast to the year A D 2100 | 185 |
Climatic forecast of the next 25000 years | 186 |
The Last Billion Years of Climate | 189 |
The last billion years of climate | 190 |
Chronology of Discovery | 195 |
SUGGESTED READING | 203 |
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