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Earth has had five major ice ages in its geographic history. In fact, we’re supposed to be in one right now. But global carbon emissions have stopped the Earth’s glaciation, and researchers are unsure it will ever return.
Receding ice age
Approximately 2,000 years ago, the Barnes Ice Cap, covering part of Canada’s Baffin Island, began growing. This marked the beginning of an ice age, which generally occur over millions of years. But in the 1960s, the expansion started reversing course, according to a study published in the journal Science. “It was just getting started, everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen,” Nicolás Young, a geochemist and first author of the study, said in a release. “And yet it stopped.”
The ice cap’s retreat coincided with anthropogenic climate change driving up summer temperatures. Researchers were able to reconstruct the history of the Barnes Ice Cap, finding that Earth’s climate had “warmed enough that the Barnes Ice Cap lost more ice in the summer than it added in winter,” said the release. The glacier’s edges have “retreated an average of 4 meters (13.12 feet) per year since the 1980s,” which “coincides with a period of rapidly increasing carbon emissions” that is causing “ice to go into retreat worldwide,” said Wired.
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While it may seem like avoiding an ice age is a good development, experts say it’s also a cycle disruption. Ice ages are usually triggered by “changing positions of Earth’s ever-moving continents, which affect ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns,” said the Utah Geological Survey. And since “periods of glaciation happen over very long time frames,” said CNN, “it would have taken thousands of years before the ice cap approached a size where it would have affected people’s everyday lives.”
The study’s findings are a “very powerful example of how we have jolted the system,” Young said in the release. Climate models suggest that the Barnes Ice Cap will likely be gone entirely in the future. And ice ages, once “extremely natural and predictable” phenomena, are “now gone” too.
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Devika Rao has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022, covering science, the environment, climate and business. She previously worked as a policy associate for a nonprofit organization advocating for environmental action from a business perspective.
