How Ice Ages Happen: The Milankovitch Cycles 

I made a follow up to this video explaining more: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eB3DJtQZVsw.html These cycles have little to do with the global warming debate. These cycles occur of hundreds of thousands of years and is unrelated to any changes over the past century. Please see my follow up video.

Don’t let this man trick you we all know that damn squirrel has something to do with it

Ice Ages happen when a squirrel tries to protect its nuts.

It’s 4 am, I’m drinking beer and learning about our planet. Cool stuff

Awesome information. I learned more from this short video than I have from much longer videos. Great job, putting this together

Interesting and well done but it would have been much more interesting if you had explained exactly where we are currently in each of the three cycles.

I was talking about ice ages with my brothers yesterday....And today it's in my recommendation list. Google a.i is observing our conversation on deep level

Very interesting, thank you. I saw a documentary where someone was studying ice ages - on [I think] Barbados! Every time the sea level dropped, a new layer of coral was exposed and died, and a new coral reef began to grow further down. The age of each coral terrace could be dated, and they matched the Milankovich Cycle very closely

Excellent vid. Explains the phenomenon to the point without not needed diversions. Plain and simple. Thank you.

That's one of the best presentations I've seen on this topic. Just plain and easy to understand info. Thanks.

I can't wait to wish everyone happy aphelion on July 4th.

Excellent video. As a kid, I've always wondered about the tilt and orbit paths of the Earth relative to the Sun, but never knew the effects changed and interacted with each other!

Incredible. All these forces, centrifugal, orbits, interactions between planets. I imagine Sunspot activity also plays a role. Great video.

Best explanation I have found for this topic, easy even for a layman like me . Thanks 🙏🏻

The Ice Ages will come and go again. There is nothing we can do about that.

At least RU-vid is always here to educate people that couldn’t go to college. We need more of this for the masses.

Thank you so much, I have a test later, and this has been 10 times better than the video the teacher showed us!

Milankovic is very underrated. His calendar is the most accurate one

Your videos are so damn clear and easy to follow. High density of learning/connections per minute. Make more!!!

This is one of the best narrators. It's very concise in answering this question. It would be good with examples of the three cycles and how they affected human evolution and spread over Earth. We can also factor in some irregular things like solar outbursts and meteors - that may have interfered with the cycles.

6:20 Excellent graph! I've been looking for such a representation for work. Thank you!

Wow! Perfectly clear, excellent graphics, informative message. What else could you ask for? Thank you!

When I was in elementary school in the 70's we were told there would be an ice age by the time we became adults

Wow this was a wonderful video. Had all the answers to my questions and did it fast. Thank you for increasing my knowledge

Very good video! Got recommended this by a friend and I’ve subbed to the channel! Hope your day is going well.

This is the kind of content I like to see, damn! Clean narration, good visuals, and I can't believe I'm saying this but the lack of music actually added to this video! I usually try to reach out to people and offer mine but forget about it, I like the way you do these videos man keep it up! 💎

So well presented and so interesting I did not want it to end so soon!

Thanks for the video. You explained it beautifully,without the usual narration rhetoric, so thanks for that, too.

Brief and clear explanation about the Milankovitch cycles. Thanks for sharing this to us.

Thank you so much for this video, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the precession was until I saw the animation and the way you explained this made it clear!

The best explanation of the Milankovitch cycles I have heard. The previous interglacial was the result of a more coherent alignment of the cycles producing a warmer climate.

Very succinct description of the complex Milankovitch cycles.

Hey! Amazing video, great for the exam I have coming up tomorrow! Could you maybe explain also the effect of the time lag in the melting of ice and how that might exacerbate cooling? Does it influence the start/ending of ice ages, or does it play more into how often ice ages occur?

Reading through the comments, I saw a couple of salient points that add to this effect that I also want to reiterate. The effects of the solar maximum and minimums, grand solar minimum in particular, and the effects of volcanic eruptions, especially those like the Toba eruption in Indonesia 74k years ago, and eruptions like Yellowstone, would have a major impact, but even eruptions like Mt.St . Helens and Mt Pinatubo had recently recorded effects on a global scale. Krakatoa was another major one that produced "the year without a summer". Grand Solar Minimum like the Maunder Minimum that produced the "Little Ice Age" between the 17th and 18th centuries should be considered too. This is an excellent explanation of yet another major factor in the natural, uncontrollable cycle of climate. Great video!

This video is in the least need of a fact check tag, but those damned fact checkers obviously aren't scientists.

Such a clear explanation with great graphics- wonderful - instant subscribe! As a young geology student in the 90s I was captivated by a talk I heard by Dr Brad Pillans about Milankovitch Cycles and sea level change and its effect on a tectonically uplifting landscape - creating so called marine terraces. Good examples of these are found in Whanganui and northern Taranaki provinces, as well as other areas in NZ. Yes, Ice Ages and warm periods are natural, but they happen on timescales significantly longer than human civilisation to date. For the first time ever, the Anthropocene is upon us.

Wow, it's like that 1 in a 1,000,000 videos on scientific topic that is actually made to be understandable! Thanks a lot!

Also the sun has cycles... Solar Minimum(cooler) and Solar Maximum(warmer) Great video!!!!

It's not so much a question of the heat capacity but primarily a question of the mechanism of heat transport. On solid ground it is heat conduction where as on water you have convection. Convection can be magnitudes more efficient transporting heat from deeper layers to the surface thus preventing the formation of ice. Else from this: Great video and very well explained !

Multiple factors, makes sense. I would like to see this on a related to average temp chart showing us where we are in the cycle. Also, curious why the news only talks about one factor, C02. Which I agree is a factor but also agree it is not the only factor.

I'm curious how much of an effect atmospheric composition has on global temperature versus the milankovitch cycle. Is the effect stronger or weaker?

Thank you. This was a homework assignment , for my geology lesson📚

Another great video! Awesome work Paul.

Great visuals. Well presented. Thank you

One thing you didn’t mention is atmospheric conditions due to volcanic eruptions, such as this years Tonga eruption resulted in record floods never seen before. 3 record flooding events in 8 months. And that’s just in Australia alone. This has an impact on temperature, which in turn affects when the next ice age will come.

A great explainer, very clear and good animations. Thanks.

Wonderfully explained, easily digestible video on a complex 3D phenomena. Bravo chap!

Live this stuff!! Keep it up!! Just found you.

Its virtually unbelievable and dreadfully faith shattering to realize just how temporary we actually are, like an accident of nature arising between crushing and destroying glaciations.

Im studying geography/ GIS and I gotta say you make great graphics and the information is clear. Great content!

Wow amazing infographics. Great work!

4:50 when you say sometimes tilts towards sometimes tilts away it’s confusing to some students because it implies the earth’s tilt changes dramatically from left to right

If only all of the videos on climate were as clear and rational as this one. Excellent.

So if the government makes a tax for this will it solve the problem ?

I love how YT marks this for context citing Wikipedia. Now there's a website I trust...NOT!

The whole world needs to see this to show that nothing we do affects climate change.

winter down southern hemisphere is late n later with season pass right? temperature flux up and down

I can imagine some hippie graduate at RU-vid freaking out about this and citing context.

I physically needed to see this video. It's very well presented too so thank you for that information.

So far this is the easiest video to follow when trying to understand precessions and whatnot. I came from some 26000 thing and ages of zodiacs, was absolutely confused with the whole advanced civilization conspiracy, and finally I found this which makes everything easier for the simple person to understand. Why I got dragged into the whole zodiac end-of-the-world conspiracies though? I don't understand.

Best explanation I've heard. Congratulations!

Damn RU-vid. You recommend me this on Jan 03.

I like the "Milankovich Cycles" explanation at the top of this page. Thanks.

What does this do to variation between hemispheres? What is the net energy exposure change from peak to peak?

Very nicely explained. Thank you.

Excellent graphics and clear explanation

Really interesting, really simple and really informative!!! Thanks a lot!!! Good work!!!

Each glacial period is subject to positive feedback which makes it more severe, and negative feedback which mitigates and (in all cases so far) eventually ends it. The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial-interglacial periods within an ice age. The consensus is that several factors are important: atmospheric composition, such as the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (the specific levels of the previously mentioned gases are now able to be seen with the new ice core samples from the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Dome C in Antarctica over the past 800,000 years); changes in Earth's orbit around the Sun known as Milankovitch cycles; the motion of tectonic plates resulting in changes in the relative location and amount of continental and oceanic crust on Earth's surface, which affect wind and ocean currents; variations in solar output; the orbital dynamics of the Earth-Moon system; the impact of relatively large meteorites and volcanism including eruptions of supervolcanoes.[58][citation needed] Some of these factors influence each other. For example, changes in Earth's atmospheric composition (especially the concentrations of greenhouse gases) may alter the climate, while climate change itself can change the atmospheric composition (for example by changing the rate at which weathering removes CO2). Maureen Raymo, William Ruddiman and others propose that the Tibetan and Colorado Plateaus are immense CO2 "scrubbers" with a capacity to remove enough CO2 from the global atmosphere to be a significant causal factor of the 40 million year Cenozoic Cooling trend. They further claim that approximately half of their uplift (and CO2 "scrubbing" capacity) occurred in the past 10 million years.[59][60] Ice sheets that form during glaciations erode the land beneath them. This can reduce the land area above sea level and thus diminish the amount of space on which ice sheets can form. This mitigates the albedo feedback, as does the rise in sea level that accompanies the reduced area of ice sheets, since open ocean has a lower albedo than land.[55] Another negative feedback mechanism is the increased aridity occurring with glacial maxima, which reduces the precipitation available to maintain glaciation. The glacial retreat induced by this or any other process can be amplified by similar inverse positive feedbacks as for glacial advances.[56] According to research published in Nature Geoscience, human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will defer the next glacial period. Researchers used data on Earth's orbit to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one and from this have predicted that the next glacial period would usually begin within 1,500 years. They go on to predict that emissions have been so high that it will not.[57] An important form of feedback is provided by Earth's albedo, which is how much of the sun's energy is reflected rather than absorbed by Earth. Ice and snow increase Earth's albedo, while forests reduce its albedo. When the air temperature decreases, ice and snow fields grow, and they reduce forest cover. This continues until competition with a negative feedback mechanism forces the system to an equilibrium. One theory is that when glaciers form, two things happen: the ice grinds rocks into dust, and the land becomes dry and arid. This allows winds to transport iron rich dust into the open ocean, where it acts as a fertilizer that causes massive algal blooms that pulls large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. This in turn makes it even colder and causes the glaciers to grow more.[50] In 1956, Ewing and Donn[51] hypothesized that an ice-free Arctic Ocean leads to increased snowfall at high latitudes. When low-temperature ice covers the Arctic Ocean there is little evaporation or sublimation and the polar regions are quite dry in terms of precipitation, comparable to the amount found in mid-latitude deserts. This low precipitation allows high-latitude snowfalls to melt during the summer. An ice-free Arctic Ocean absorbs solar radiation during the long summer days, and evaporates more water into the Arctic atmosphere. With higher precipitation, portions of this snow may not melt during the summer and so glacial ice can form at lower altitudes and more southerly latitudes, reducing the temperatures over land by increased albedo as noted above. Furthermore, under this hypothesis the lack of oceanic pack ice allows increased exchange of waters between the Arctic and the North Atlantic Oceans, warming the Arctic and cooling the North Atlantic. (Current projected consequences of global warming include a brief ice-free Arctic Ocean period by 2050.) Additional fresh water flowing into the North Atlantic during a warming cycle may also reduce the global ocean water circulation. Such a reduction (by reducing the effects of the Gulf Stream) would have a cooling effect on northern Europe, which in turn would lead to increased low-latitude snow retention during the summer.[52][53][54] It has also been suggested[by whom?] that during an extensive glacial, glaciers may move through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, extending into the North Atlantic Ocean far enough to block the Gulf Stream. There is evidence that greenhouse gas levels fell at the start of ice ages and rose during the retreat of the ice sheets, but it is difficult to establish cause and effect (see the notes above on the role of weathering). Greenhouse gas levels may also have been affected by other factors which have been proposed as causes of ice ages, such as the movement of continents and volcanism. The Snowball Earth hypothesis maintains that the severe freezing in the late Proterozoic was ended by an increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, mainly from volcanoes, and some supporters of Snowball Earth argue that it was caused in the first place by a reduction in atmospheric CO2. The hypothesis also warns of future Snowball Earths. In 2009, further evidence was provided that changes in solar insolation provide the initial trigger for Earth to warm after an Ice Age, with secondary factors like increases in greenhouse gases accounting for the magnitude of the change.[61]

Best video ever !!! Learned so much !❤

Excellent. Very clearly presented. Thank you!

Thank you for this excellent video. The graphics perfectly explained concepts that would have been difficult to describe with static images and very difficult to describe in words. With these improvements in information technology, why are we spending three times as much in inflation adjusted costs for education than when I was in grade school and getting no better academic results? We should be teaching children twice as much for a quarter the cost.

Beautifully explained, I have subscribed

This info is to badass to let it go by. Subscribed

The Milankovitch Cycles started about 3 million years ago, and are still happening. We have been in an ice age for 15 to 20 million years, since the re-glaciation of Antarctica. People tend to call Glaciation Periods "Ice Ages", but they are just fluctuations within the current ice age. We currently have ice caps on both poles, definitely in an ice age, right now. We are at the top, or warm part of a Milankovitch cycle, called an Inter-glacial Period. It gets warm for 10,000 - 20,000 yrs or so, and then the cycle gets cold for 100,000 yrs. The cycles used to be much shorter and less extreme in temperature change, and had 40,000 yrs of cold. Now it is about a 100,000 yrs of cold.

This was so interesting. Thank you!

Does the weight of the ice have any effect on earths rotation? During Ice Ages, since water is taken from the oceans and put in the Northern Hemisphere does that make Earth top heavy and create more of a wobble?

Very interesting, very well done too. Congrats !👍

I'm glad this was uploaded and very clear. I was trying to understand something regarding this earlier, great timing, thank you! Good recommendation for me.

The animation is amazing!! How much those factors can have influenced in the global climate in the last 500 years?

Just a quick question sorry if it’s stupid, but if we could theoretically reduce the amount of light the earth receives wouldn’t it be possible to reverse climate change, and global warming?

Ur tilt animation has remind me of my geography Subject😵🤧

Very informative! Excellent work

My first video of yours and you nailed it. Well done.

Feeding the RU-vid algorithm. Great video. I appreciate it.

Well done. And if ice forms over land easier than water, due to specific heat differences due to h20 hydrogen bonding, then continental drift can play a small role too over a long enough timeline, right?

"How dare you look to this video for hope!?!?"

While covering about the evolution of life and especially the Snowball earth I kind of experienced this pattern, but this fact was hard to engulf that greenery gave us so many ice ages, this cements the fact that excess of everything is bad....

A very talented actor, i really liked his performance in "the line of fire" together with Clint Eastwood.

This is excellent. Thank you!

It's really interesting, it's really simple, it's really informative

Ice ages: proof that you should never forget to close the fridge door

Cool story bro. How did a mastodon get flash frozen? Food in it's stomach still intact. Could magnetic excursions have anything to do with it?

Great explanation, thanks. I've always believed that nature and astronomy have a far greater influence on the warming or cooling of the planet than humans do.

Best thing, advice & wisdom I've heard you share. And you're full of amazing perspectives and wisdom! Always leading with empathy and compassion regardless of the pursuit.

Every single person in the world should be made to watch this and then take a test on it so people will really understand what is going on with climate change

Milutin Milankovic even said that the sun is cooling down. and he said that we will run out of resources that we dig or whatever, but that people will survive,, in the distant future... And he said a lot more.. I read and watched a lot of videos about him. rest in peace Milutin...

Fantastic Explanation!

congrats on the 400k views :).

Very lucid. Thank you. There are cycles within cycles. 'round like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel..

very clear explanation like a mass telecommunications expert