Scientists calculate Earth’s Ice Age temperature by studying glacial cooling: Research

Scientists, in a recent study, ‘revisited’ climate sensitivity and glacial cooling to calculate how cold it got on Earth during the depths of the last Ice Age, when ice sheets covered large parts of North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The research published in the journal Nature noted that the average global temperature during the period known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) from roughly 23,000 to 19,000 years ago was about 7.8 degrees Celsius, some 7 Celsius colder than 2019. 

Jessica Tierney, who is University of Arizona paleoclimatologist and the lead author of the research, said, “Past climates are the only information we have about what really happens when the Earth cools or warms to a large degree. So by studying them, we can better constrain what to expect in the future”. 

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As per the study, the researchers noted that certain region was much cooler than the global average. They found that the polar regions cooled far more than the tropics, with the Arctic region 14-degree celsius colder than the global average.

The researchers made the calculations with the help of chemical measurements on tiny fossils of zooplankton. They even used preserved structures of fats from other types of plankton that change in response to water temperature, what the scientists called a ‘temperature proxy’, to come to the conclusion. 

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Human hunting contributed to extinction 

As per the study, the research team used the information, along with climate change model simulations, to calculate the average global temperatures. They noted that during the Ice Age, which lasted from about 115,000 to 11,000 years ago, large mammals well adapted to a cold climate such as the mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos and sabre-toothed cats rammed the landscape. 

They further said that humans entered North America for the first time during the Ice Age, crossing land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska with sea levels much lower than they are today. Moreover, they added that human hunting is believed to have contributed to mass extinctions globally of many species at the end of the Ice Age. 

Tierney said, “What is interesting is that Alaska was not entirely covered with ice. There was an ice-free corridor that allowed humans to travel across the Bering Strait, into Alaska. Central Alaska was actually not that much colder than today, so for Ice Age humans it might have been a relatively nice place to settle”. 

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