A New Ice Age Was Beginning. Then Humans Started Burning Fossil Fuels

“After the ice cap retreated, mosses eventually colonized this newly exposed land,” says Nicolás Young, a paleoclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and lead author of the new paper. “These mosses are living there, and things are normal—then, eventually, the ice cap starts to re-expand. The ice covers the moss, and kills it.” The traces of the dead moss are preserved in newly reexposed land, allowing Young and his team to piece together a timeline of how the ice has moved across the landscape.

Thanks to these records, Young and his coauthors estimate that the glacier started growing again around 2,000 years ago. This may have signaled the start of another glaciation period.

But starting in the 1960s, the ice cap has done something that wouldn’t correspond with another ice age: It started getting smaller again. The team used historic aerial photos that showed that the ice has reversed course, retreating significantly back from its new margins. The Barnes Ice Cap’s edges have retreated an average of 4 meters per year since the 1980s. That coincides with a period of rapidly increasing carbon emissions, which has caused ice to go into retreat worldwide. The ice cap offers a particularly stark example, though, given the growth prior to the 1960s.

“Modern retreat of this glacier has reversed 2,000 years of net expansion—that’s a pretty decent chunk of time,” Young says.

Meredith Kelly, a professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth, says the data gathered in the study is “awesome” and that the study shows a “clear pattern of what the ice cap was doing.” However, Kelly says that she would like to see a comparison of some of the data to other sites around the world to more fully grasp how, exactly, the Earth was moving into its glaciation period before the effects of human-caused warming kicked in. While we have a broad understanding of what kicks off periods where ice can grow, the exact mechanisms are still something that require more research.

The evidence presented in this paper, Young says, could also validate a decades-old hypothesis that has long been held up by climate deniers as “evidence” climate change is a hoax. In the early 1970s, scientists gathered for a meeting at Brown University to discuss hypotheses of when the next ice age might happen. (Young says that two of his coauthors on this paper were at that meeting.) The scientists concluded that a glaciation period was so imminent that they sent a warning letter to President Richard Nixon.

“I think this study actually helps show that scientists were right about a pending glaciation,” Young says. “

Media coverage of the meeting, as well as a colder period of weather in the 1970s, have long been pitched by climate deniers as “proof” that global warming isn’t actually happening. It very much is, though, and the new research actually adds to the evidence.