The reason that provoked the ice age was announced

Scientists from the University of Arizona have voiced the reason that provoked the ice age on Earth in ancient times. In their opinion, the whole point is the violation of the channels of the ocean in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

To do this, experts have created a detailed computer simulation, which realistically recreated the conditions that prevailed on the planet at the beginning of the last ice age. Larger regions of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet were also brought into the model with high spatial detail.

It turned out that the «gateways» of the ocean between the islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago are a key factor influencing the climate of the North Atlantic, which form the ice sheet in Scandinavia. Blockage of these «gates» with ice leads to insufficient cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, which leads to a violation of the formation of ice deposits in northern Canada and Siberia, and not in Scandinavia. It was also possible to prove this in a computer model, where the waterways between the islands of the archipelago were blocked.

The conclusions of scientists were confirmed by data from the North Atlantic, which report on glaciers in northern Canada, which formed several thousand years before their appearance in the European part. According to the authors of the work, their findings apply to all ice ages, not just the last one. In addition, their model will reveal previously unknown interactions in the Earth system.