between ice ages

[Tinaa]

I read a book awhile back about a thriving technological society in full bloom before the last ice age. The work was pure fiction but thought provoking. Maybe the last ice age wiped out all signs of the civilization and the only survivers became the hunter/gatherers of our early history. Would there be any signs or would the glaciers have ground everything into tiny bits of nothing? According to the ice core samples, ice ages occur fairly often on our little world. If the next one is particularly harsh, how could we save ourselves? Could we survive?

[QJones]

Well, yes and no.

If you put me, right now, on a glacier ... well, I'd die pretty quick and maybe only some bacteria living on my skin would adapt to the new conditions.

But, the next ice age is a looong way off. And I'm of the opinion that most environmental threats can be countered by technology. If we (as a species) develop enough technology in time - which is quite reasonable - then the threat of an ice age will be trivial.

I'm pretty sure a previous civilisation would be detectable - even after 100,000 years - if their construction technologies were rather advanced. I can see how houses would be eroded to nothing, etc., but things like "Fort Knox" would kinda stick out - piles of purified gold all placed together. knowwhatimean?

[kashi]

Qjones,

From what I've read, geologically speaking we are actually overdue for another ice age (based on drilling kilometres down into the ice caps, a pattern was discovered...10000 years of warm, 90000 years of cold etc....the last ice age ended roughly 10000 years ago).

There are several theories about previous civilisations on Earth. Many conspriracy theorists go crazy about this, although as yet there is nothing to substantiate these claims (coverup maybe :P ). I heard somewhere that a nuclear reactor was found in an archeological dig in a part of Africa. This was supposedly revealed after a third world country was mysteriously exporting large quantities of highly enriched Uranium. I am a little suspicious about this claims obviously.

You must also wonder how the Pyrimids of Eygpt could have been constructed without technology? The architecture is highly advanced....every block fits together perfectly, even with complex networks of tunnels.

[Matthew]

Would there be any signs or would the glaciers have ground everything into tiny bits of nothing?

I would have thought that somwhere we would have found something by now. Maybe its all still there too be found.

[Planetwatcher]

Surviving an ice age won't be too hard if you are from the more northern lattitudes.
Yup, up here in the north we are just about due for our annual ice age, which most people laughingly call winter.
I understand Vancover is expecting a long winter.
You got any snow yet Fraiser? :P
If so, you know it's going to stay till what, maybe late May?

I'd better cut it out before the folks down south start wanting to throw snowballs at me. Or worse yet maybe rocks.

[Matthew]

Surviving an ice age won't be too hard if you are from the more northern lattitudes.

It'd be hard if you were too far south.

Eventually we might have the technology to manipulate the weather itslf preventing such a thing.

[DippyHippy]

I agree with Kashi... I've read on more than a few occasions that we're long overdue for an ice age and that the warmer periods are fewer and shorter...

RE evidence of prior civilisations... like Mulder, I want to believe... I would love for there to have been an Atlantis and I honestly hope there was because I'm clinging to the romantic notion than humankind can be much better than it's been for the past 6 or 7 thousand years... but as it's been said, surely we'd have found something by now?

The Pyramids are interesting... I'm not convinced the Egyptians built them but at the same time, if I had to choose between them and a long lost civilisations, I'd pick the cat-worshippers any day. There just isn't enough evidence to suggest a prior (or alien) civilisation built them.

What's most interesting is that we can't build the Pyramids now, with technology that's (allegedly) 6,000 years more advanced. So what are we doing wrong?

[kashi]

This is a great article about ice ages etc:
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/020107fa_FACT

One of the best scientific articles I have read actually.

[zephyr46]

NOAA

BBC

Nature

I read somewhere, that we were still coming out of the last Ice Age. Haven't found it yet.

[Tinaa]

I read The Life and Death of Earth (or something like that) and the ice age it described was not survivable. I believe that the so called "global warming" is actually a natural phenomenon that precedes an ice age. Not that South Texas will is going to freeze over soon, but maybe in several thousand years. A cold front did blow in today and the high temp was a cool 69 F.

[Josh]

Ohhh Tinaa! You better start buying lots of cans of baked beans. That cool wind is only beginning.

I wonder, though, why an ice age would be unsurvivable. That seems a little odd. If the cycle times are correct and evolution is correct then 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 off isn't very much time for evolution to change things all that much. Mammals must survive ice ages or we wouldn't be here now. 90,000 years isn't even that long a time evolutionly speakng. So the evolution during an ice age of any species would also be quite minor. Yet ... here we are. mammals and reptiles (who need warmth to warm their blood) in all sorts of shapes and forms.

[Matthew]

Overnight we would not find ourselves in the middle of an ice age. It would take time, precautions could be made, plans could be formulated. But life would be altered significantly.

Didn't us humans evolve from Africa, which is fairly equatorial. If any place would stay warm, it would be the equator. So maybe humans have survived an ice age before.

[DippyHippy]

I always thought it was the Ice Age that allowed primitive man to (literally) walk into the US from Russia and into Australia from Asia...

...once the ice receded, they found themselves trapped there and became the Native Americans and Aborigines...

...or was I totally lied to by James Buerk in his "After The Warming" eco-documentary??

[starrman]

Unless my understanding of geological and archaeological information is way off base, ice ages (or at least the more recent ones) are eminently survivable. The most recent ice age is still in the process of ending, and numerous artifacts survive from previous eras. The role of ice ages in the arrival of humans in the Americas is still somewhat controversial, but delicately formed flints (so-called Folsom points and others) have been recovered in North America and reliably dated to c. 30,000 bce, and I'm fairly sure that digs in South America have pushed dates for human habitation back beyond 50,000 bce, well prior to the last ice age.

Clear skies.

[Haglund]

Originally posted by Tinaa@Nov 3 2003, 04:23 AM
I read a book awhile back about a thriving technological society in full bloom before the last ice age. The work was pure fiction but thought provoking. Maybe the last ice age wiped out all signs of the civilization and the only survivers became the hunter/gatherers of our early history. Would there be any signs or would the glaciers have ground everything into tiny bits of nothing? According to the ice core samples, ice ages occur fairly often on our little world. If the next one is particularly harsh, how could we save ourselves? Could we survive?

Even though an iceage would crush a lot of our civilization quite badly there would still be lots of remains left for future archaeologists to study... And yes I do think that if we get a few centuries of time, then we could develop technology enough to stop an iceage, possibly.

[Tinaa]

From the little I know, greenhouse gases are what keeps our world warm enough to support life as we know it. Runaway greenhouse gases give is the world Venus, and too little Mars. Why, then, the big deal over greenhouse gases today? Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas. Remove Co2 a nd the others and we have another Mars on our hands.

[QJones]

There's a LOT of C02 on earth, but the thing is, most of it is chemically sealed in our surface rocks.

But, if these rocks were allowed to become a little hotter, the C02 would boil off - leading to more heat, and more boiling.

The theory is that (unlike a buffer solution), Earth has very little leeway when it comes to a runaway greenhouse effect. The warmer it gets, the more C02 will be released from the rocks.

[eggplant]

While I'm certain we, or some one would survive an ice age in our time. I risk repeating myself from other threads... that I'd be far more worried about a rising ocean temperature/level in the forseeable future due to our pre-ice age warming trend. As most of the Great Plains of the US were once under water, they could be again. The evidence does point that direction at this time.
As for the Pyramids, Don't kid yourselves, with enough whips and slaves you CAN make everything fit perfectly... Granted they did a right fine job of it. It would be extremely difficult to recreate, but not impossible... We like to think it couldn't be human (reminds me of the ghost busters line "no human would stack books that way...") I also feel the sentiment like Mulder wanting to believe... And in many cases I do... Or at least I've experienced things science has not explained yet... And science could explain aliens... But the Pyramids? Please do me the favor of never expressing that opinion to the Egyptians... ;)
I hope I'm not sounding negative here...
As for the Archaelogical evidence, You guys are correct in your positions (It was my field) At least some of it would have been "snowed in" to the leading edge of the Ice sheets and pushed to the norhtern plains of the US... Since we have spent the last 200 years washing away the topsoil of that region and not found anything, I'm supposing there is nothing to find. I could be wrong, they're still digging mammoths out of the tundra in Siberia... I'm sure there's something to Atlantis, but you know how legends grow...

[eggplant]

There is some evidence for atlantis, but it's only written accounts... I can't remember if it was Plato or Socrates... either way neither were persecuted for writing about Atlantis... I think it was something against the gods of their society. Like maybe the worlds not flat, and perhaps we are not the center of the universe? My memory escapes me... Senior moment... They even had evidence but were ruined by a beligerent power structure supporting the "ignorant" popular construction of the universe. It was as if they were not supposed to think about things. I wonder if their Gods Appollo, Athena, whoeverius, made it clear that unsanctified knowledge was not to be thought or if it was the people governing? Either way evidence is sketchy, mostly written word...

[Tinaa]

How could we survive an ice age? Where would all the people go? How could we feed 6 billion+ people? I am sure we'll make strides in tech before then, but...what if we are still stuck on Earth? Ice ages are supposed to happen slowly, but according to some books and stuff I've read, ice ages may happen swiftly and that could be deadly.

[DippyHippy]

There's a programme about a possible Ice Age just around the corner that aired in the UK tonight - I recorded it but I haven't seen it yet because I'm at work. I'll have a squint at it and will post any interesting tidbits here

[Dan Luna]

A classic "Horizon" frightener just like they used to show in the 70s. Having told us we're all doomed in 50 years, then reducing it to 20, they ended the program, only to tell us not to worry about it because next week's program is about a secret code in the B*ble revealing the world will end in 3 years!

[kashi]

I'm sure humanity as a whole would survive, but obviously many people would die of starvation. In the last ice age, global temperatures were 8 degrees cooler on average. That's going to cause some issues in Europe, Russia and parts of North America, but maybe parts of Africa might become more habitable.

Maybe Australia will get more good ski seasons!

[DippyHippy]

Dan, yeah, I thought that!!!

They did raise some valid points about the Gulf Stream though because from what (little) I know, it *does* act as a kind of thermostat... if that does stop, it could have quite serious consequences all round.

What they didn't say specifically (because it wouldn't have been so scary) is that even *if* you take it as read that the Gulf Stream will stop (sooner or later), nobody seems to know *when* it will stop.

Sure, it could be within 20 or 50 years but it also might not be for several hundred. All they said was that over the next few years they anticipate a *lot* more fresh water being dumped into the Gulf Stream and that as a result, the Gulf Stream would be slowed or even stopped completely.

In short, it was a lot of conjecture based around what we already know: the ice is melting and there's far more fresh water being dumped into the salty oceans.

I'll bet a fiver someone comes up with another theory and another model which basically says they've got it all wrong (again)

[Josh]

If we can create large enough bio-domes or -cities then survival wouldn;t be a problem on Earth. Any ice age induced crush wouldn't just 'happen' one day. it would be very very gradual. Of course there's always the opportunity of setting up home somewhere else.

[DippyHippy]

Josh, one of the points raised in the programme last night was that of the Gulf Stream stops because the salt water is too light to sink when it reaches the Artic, then potentially the change could happen very quickly... although to be fair, depending on when it happened, it might only affect the UK and Scandanavia or additionally the north-western portions of Euope (including France)

It would have drastic effects on the rainfall elsewhere on the planet though, specifically central America (not the USA), which would effectively suffer severe drought.

[Matthew]

A string of La Nina (not to be confused with El Nino) would lower the Earths temperature. Though, over the past 20 years we have had more El Nino (which increase the world's temperature) than La Nina.

This could be a factor in gloabal warming.

[Planetwatcher]

I have some problem with the Atlantis thing, because if you removed the ocians so that the contenents were in direct contact with each other, you would find they all fit together like a global jigsaw puzzle.

As for actually surviving an ice age. I think many people will die, but human kind will survive under natures most primitive, and unfair but true natural law.
The strongest and fittest will survive the best and even thrive.
The weakest and sicklyist will die first and proabley most horribley.

But I would think the O zone depletion should be a bigger concern then another ice age or global warming.

[DippyHippy]

Am I right in thinking that ozone depletion is a factor in global warming though?

[Tinaa]

Or perhaps global warming is affecting the O-zone layer. I know that humans are having a detrimental effect on our planet. However, volcanos are still causing much more harm to the atmosphere than all of our harnful emissions. Wasn;t that why Earth was so warm during the age of the dinosaur?