Peter Huybers: 'Ice ages are the outstanding mystery in Earth sciences'
Today we’re speaking with climate scientist Peter Huybers of Harvard. Dr. Huybers received a 2009 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He spoke with EarthSky about why the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago.
Peter Huybers: I think ice ages are really the outstanding mystery in Earth sciences presently.
Scientists have scrutinized(详细检查) the evidence for ice ages in Earth’s past. Dr. Huyber’s recent research focused on one possible factor triggering the end of an ice age – volcanic activity.
Peter Huybers: The major finding was that there was a dramatic uptick in volcanic activity during the last deglaciation(冰川消退).
Volcanoes can cause carbon dioxide, or CO2 – a greenhouse gas – to increase in Earth’s atmosphere. Twelve thousand years ago, volcanoes might have caused warming and melting ice. In some places on Earth, melting ice sheets might have taken a load off rock below. That might have increased volcanic activity even more – which means more CO2 – and more warming.
Peter Huybers: In so much as volcanoes played an important role in providing a feedback in past climate, we can then contrast that with the even much stronger control of CO2, which humans are exerting.
In other words, volcanoes at the end of the last ice age were releasing about three-tenths of a gigaton of CO2 each year. Today, humans are releasing about a hundred times more.
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