Oregon daily emerald., January 13, 1975, Page 5, Image 5

Scientists debate arrival
date for earth's next ice age
By NIGEL CALOER
(C) 1974, The Manchester Guardian
Casting the snow blitz as science fiction would be
easy. You describe the children tobogganing with amaz
ing expertise acquired in nine months’ continual practice.
Their pinched and grey-faced parents announce that, as it
is already August and the snow still hasn't melted, they
wili have to move. The news bulletins carry dire accounts
of the population of New England migrating to Florida.
Not being by dispositon a doomsday man, I take no
pleasure in reporting that such a picture of the start of a
new ice age would be founded in facts. The facts have
emerged, in recent years and months, from research
mto the ice ages of the past They imply that the threat of a
new ice age must now stand along side nuclear war as a
likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
Dunng an ice age, solid sheets of ice about a mile in
thickness obliterate Canada and Scandinavia. Much of
Russia and Bntain also vanish under the ice, along with
northern sections of the United States and many moun
tainous areas such as the alps of Europe Beyond the
edges of the ice sheets, large regions become frosty
deserts For instance in the most recent ice age—by no
means the worst—in Europe, you would have had to qo to
the south of France to find any surviving trees. Although
primarily a phenomenon of the northern lands, an ice
age alters the climate all over the world. As the whole
weather machine runs cold and slow, icing occurs in the
Southern Hemisphere, too, while the tropics sire vulnera
ble to severe droughts.
That the ice erupted more than once in the geologi
-—-->
upi
roundup
Amtrak train derails
KELSO, Wash.—A southbound Coast Starlight
Amtrak train with 122 passengers plus crewmem
bers on board jumped off the tracks Sunday 20 miles
east of here First reports indicated there was only
one injury. An ambulance was sent to the scene
along with aid from the sheriff's office. Brian Duff,
news director for Amtrak, said from Washington,
DC, that the second locomotive and all 10 cars of
the southbound train derailed but remained upright.
He added he did not know the speed or weather
conditions at the time nor was the casue of the de
railment immediately determined
India recognizes PLO
The Palestine Liberation Oraamzation scored a
major political victory Friday by Winning formal rec
ognition from India, the first non-Arab country to give
diplomatic status to the guerrilla group PLO chair
man Yasser Arafat hailed the agreement with the
Indian government to open an office in New Delhi as
a very big push forward in the PLO s struggle for
recognition as the sole legitimate representative of
the Palestine people
cally recent past has been plain tor many years. Yet there
was no apparent cause for alarm. The warm intervals
between the ice ages were thought to last for 100,000 to
300,000 years, and new ice ages to take many thousands
of years to develop. The recent discoveries overturn this
assessment in both respects.
From recent scientific studies, three salient points
emerge. The first is that the normal condition of the earth
during the past 2 million years has been icy rather that
warm. Secondly, the warm periods between the ice ages
have been very brief—about 10,000 years long, so that
the period of human civilization, from the invention of
agriculture to the landing on the moon, entirely fills a typi
cal slot of warmth between ice ages. The third salient
point is that the prime cause of the ice ages is at last clear.
The leading contemporary theory explains the com
ings and goings of the ice by small changes in the earth’s
attitude in its orbit around the sun, and in the orbit itself,
these changes alter the intensity of sunshine available in
summer to melt the winter snow of the northern hemis
phere. The varying summer sunshine can be calculated
by astronomers.
The aptness of the theory, called the Milankovitch
theory, is now unmistakable but unfortunately it tells us
that the climatic golden age was 5,000 years ago, when
the Megalitbic people of northwest turope were building
their stone circles. At that time, the summer sun shone
strongly and vigorous rainbearing winds penetrated into
the Sahara and the desert of northwest India. Since then,
the trend has been downwards, albeit on a switchback of
“little ice ages'' and warmer inervals. The northern world
will not be so warm again for 120,000 years, and a long
and deeo ice aqe will intervene. As the next ice age has, in
this sense already begun, the question naturally arises:
how quickly shall we feel its effects?
The conventional picture of the start of an ice age has
the glaciers running amok. As the snow piles up in a
nucleus of mountains, the glaciers grow and merge and
flow on to the plains to make a huge ice sheet. The
process gradually accelerates, because the high
star ding mass of ice itself encourages snow rather than
rain to settle on the surface. Modem calculators have
indicated that nature would take 15,00 to 30,000 years to
build a continent-wide ice sheet by this method. Nothing
very alarming in that: human beings would have hundreds
of generations in which to adapt to the changes. In practi
cal terms, you would notice the ice sheet inching towards
4
Drawing by Jim Longstreth
Will Eugene be under ice?
you and recommend that your grandchildren might move
a few miles farther south
This theory is now being displaced by another,
harsher theory that I call the Snow Blitz, In a snow blitz,
the ice sheets grow from the bottom up, on the plains as
well as the mountains. To be sure, mounds of ice built by
heavy snowfall in a snow blitz would also splay sideways,
in glacier fashion, but there any similarity with the conven
tional picture ends. The ice that seizes the northern lands
comes directly from the sky, as winter snow that fails to
melt during the following summer. A few inches of un
melted snow persisting from winter to the next could make
a region uninhabitable.
By a snow blitz, nature could suddenlv. in the course
of a single bad summer, put an arbitrarily large area
under ice. Thereafter the snow would simply pile up
thicker and thicker on the naked snowfield for many
- thousands of years—until the earth at last nodded its
northern summer head towards the sun well enough to
melt the ice.
A miniature snow blitz has recently occured at the
Canadian breeding-ground of the lesser snowgoose. It is
at Bylot Island at the North of Baffin Island. Since 1972,
snow has lain there unmelting through the summers. The
birds, unable to breed, are in grave trouble.
The ice age will eventually hurt most countries, by
drought if not by cold. But it will strike hardest at the
present citadels of the white man's economic power. (Not
even Mao can have thought of snow as the ultimate
agency of anti-imperialism.) In the present international
climate, Arabs, Africans and Asians might not be particu
larly tearful about the impending burial of New York and
Moscow, and they might actually oppose any interna
tional measures needed to hold back the ice.
Democrats to urge tough controls
By EDWARD DELONG
UP!
WASHINGTON—Stealing the
march on President Ford's State
of the Union proposals, congres
sional Democrats will present
their own program Monday to end
the nation's economic crisis
through a tax cut and eight other
major reforms within the next 90
days.
The program includes propos
als for a tough wage and pr'ce
control program, possiole
gasoline rationing, increased cre
dit, additional public service jobs
and an emergency housing prog
ram.
If the more traditional measures
do not show significant progress
in reducing interest rates by mid
summer, the plan says, Congress
should consider enacting a prog
ressive tax on the income derived
from interest rates of 9 per cent
and above
The seven-page document was
prepared by a task force of the
Democratic Steering and Policy
Committee Rep Jim Wriqht,
D-Tex., was chairman of the
group, named by Speaker Carl
Albert.
Challenging Congress to take
the initiative immediately rather
than wait for presidential propos
als, the program criticizes
economic policies of the Nixon
administration as "cruel and in
directly calls those of the Ford
administration “half-way and
“timid "
For too long has the economy
been allowed to drift, devoid of
purposeful direction," said the
plan, which was obtained by col
umnist Jack Anderson and made
available to UPI