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Scientists Discover Climate Change May Have Stopped Earth's Next Ice Age
A new glacial period may have been taking shape in the Arctic until global warming brought its slow advance to a halt. An ice cap in northern Canada began expanding about 2,000 years ago, according to research published in Science. The researchers argue that this growth marked the beginning of Earth’s next glacial period. By the 1960s, however, warmer summers had reversed the process, causing the ice to retreat. “It was just getting started, everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen—and yet it stopped,” says Nicolás Young, a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of the Columbia Climate School. “It’s a very powerful example of how we have jolted the system.” Young, fellow Lamont geochemist Joerg Schaefer, and their colleagues investigated the surviving remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. That enormous ice mass covered much of Canada and the northern United States from about 95,000 to 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it extended from above the Arctic Circle to Illinois, with ice more than two miles (3.2 kilometers) thick in places. The Ice Sheet That Never Fully Disappeared Today, the Laurentide survives as the Barnes Ice Cap, an ice mass roughly the size of Delaware...