Stuff You Should Know - How Ice Ages Work

Episode Date: September 27, 2016

Believe it or not, we live in an ice age. The polar glaciers give it away. Those glaciers used to come clear down to New York. We now know the traces they left are everywhere if you know what to look for; it just took some Swiss peasants to figure it out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with the Squarespace website.

And right now, listeners to Stuff You Should Know can start a free trial today. Just go to squarespace.com and enter the offer code STUFF, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace, set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from housestuffworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

And guess who's over there being quiet as a church mouse? The producer who may or may not exist, Jerry. I think people still think that. I think a few people do. Yeah? She's real. Says you. She's real, because I can always smell her miso from here.

Oh man, so I like avocado a lot, right? Say what? I like avocado a lot. Sure. Like I eat basically an avocado a day. Yeah. And normally I make guacamole, as you know, I make probably the best guacamole on the planet.

Sometimes, okay, we'll have a guac off one day. Well, yeah, but it's personal taste, you know. You know that whole thing, remember? No, no, taste is absolute. So sometimes it's just too much to make guac, right? That's where avocado toast comes in. Yeah, it's so easy. But and it's totally different too.

So if you start to get sick of guacamole, you're like, I'll have some avocado toast. Anyway, the upshot is I recently took antibiotics, which are disgusting poison, but just had to have them this time because my body would not get rid of whatever it had. And so I've been repopulating my gut flora with fermented stuff like miso.

Took some miso, put it in some avocado, whipped it up, spread it on some toast, it was great. Wow. And the avocado being a fibrous vegetable should be a prebiotic. It will probably provide the conditions for that miso to ripen into some really top-notch gut flora. Well, I'm grossed out now.

Are you really? Yeah. I found this stuff fascinating. Oh, that's your gut flora. It's a matter of personal taste, I guess. It's like people like the smell of their own poop. That's not, those are two different things. Do you like the smell of your own poop?

Sure, it smells great. Really? Yeah, I like all my smells. I gotcha. Do you like ice ages? I do. We're in one. Yeah.

How can we be in an ice age? It's hotest summer ever. Right, but the climate's not changing. Boy, this summer's been awful. Yeah, supposedly every year we just keep getting hotter and hotter. Yeah, and I have a feeling here in Georgia it's gonna be hot into October.

I noticed the change take place two day. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Hmm, not me. I was out there this morning, letting Momo out. Well, yeah. And I was like, oh, it's not muggy. Night nights are getting cooler.

That's where it starts to change. Yeah, but it's still like up in the 90s during the day. Yeah, during the day it's still kinda nasty. But it feels different to me, like the air feels different. Yeah, not me. Yeah. I just fall blasts and have an experience with it. Maybe it's seeing like cinnamon brooms in Kroger

that's put me in the fall mood already. I'm just noticing it where it's not there. Christmas decorations too, right? Yeah, Halloween stuff's been out since August. Man, just ridiculous. So back to ice ages. Like you said, we are actually in an ice age to be specific. We are in the Holocene Epoch, right?

Yes. Which features the Quaternary Ice Age. And specifically, we're in the Flandrian interglacial period. But still, even though it's interglacial, it's still an ice age that we're in. That's a mouthful. It is.

Who wrote this? Was this Molly? Molly Edmonds. Our dear old friend. Yes, she put out quality. She did. Yeah, Molly points out quite astutely that if you look at Antarctica and Greenland, you still see ice sheets.

And ice ages though are, it's not, you know, we don't have to have the entire, or a third of the earth covered in ice to be in an ice age. Because within an ice age, there's periods of cooler weather and warmer weather. And right now, the, you know, glacial and interglacial, respectively, and right now we're in an interglacial. Right.

And that's all it is. But like I said, when people look around, they don't think of us being in an ice age, because we're just during one of those warmer periods. Right, but I think, so I was reading this new scientist article about, I think it was called the history of ice on earth. And they said that there are basically three settings

that the earth has. Greenhouse, which is basically there's no ice anywhere on earth. Ice house, which is like an ice age glacial period, where there is ice. Even like today, there's ice on the Arctic and Antarctic caps, right? And then there's a snowball setting.

The most fun of all. Which is like the entire planet is frozen over. The least fun of all. Right. There've been periods of earth's history where the whole thing was just a giant ball of ice. Yeah, if you wanna talk about the, you know, the, I don't know if you wanna call it the big ice age,

but when we think of the term ice age, we, most people are probably talking about the one that began about 70,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene era. Lasted about 60,000 years. And if you're talking about the United States and the four major glaciations, they hit the Midwest, the Nebraska, the Kansan,

the Illinois, and the famous Wisconsin glaciation. Yeah, that's the one that just ended, that we just came out of the Wisconsin one. That's right. And they call them this because it's where they were, geographically. Well, that's where I think the greatest evidence of them has been discovered.

Yeah. Right? And in all this, it's kind of confusing, actually, but just the current ice age that we're in started 2.58 million years ago, right? Yeah. And again, it's still going. 2.58 million years, too present, the Quartinary Ice Age.

And so those little other subdivisions have to do with when the ice has been relatively scarce, or when it's been all over the place. Right. And then to make it even more slightly confusing, during periods of glaciation, there's even periods where the glaciers retreat and advance. Right.

That's stadial and interstadial periods. And those tend to be a little more local and happen a lot more quickly. And glacial or interglacial period happened on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Yes, that's right. And this is nothing new, like you said, this has been going on since there was a planet Earth,

but actually recognizing what is an ice age was sort of on the newer front, because in the old days, they would see a big rock and they would say, boy, that thing looks like it slid down that mountain there, because you can see that mountain's all carved up and this rock shouldn't be here. And that's weird.

So that was the great flood of biblical times. Which we did an episode on. Yeah. That was a good one. So that was kind of how things were explained, how these things ended up places where they probably did not start out. Yeah, people noticed that there was just weird stuff

going on in the geography around them, right? Yeah. But they didn't place it correctly until, it turns out, the Swiss peasantry and some German peasants as well, started to notice that their glaciers were receding. And as their glaciers receded up there and say the Alps, it left some markings that they noticed also

the same kind of markings further down the mountain. So these Swiss peasants put two and two together and said, you know what? I think the glaciers used to be way, way bigger than they are today. And that maybe that is what explains these boulders that shouldn't be here being here in the middle of this field.

And I guess from what I can gather, it was kind of like common folk wisdom in some areas of like the Swiss Alps, long before science understood it. Sure. And it was actually a Swiss geologist who was the first one to advance a genuine bona fide hypothesis for ice ages. Yeah, Lewis, I got C's is how I'm gonna pronounce that.

And he in 1837 presented his ideas about this glacial activity at a conference, a science conference, and everyone was like, man, I don't know, I don't know about you. I don't know about that. Well, they did know about him. He was a smart guy. Right, he was established, but they're like,

you just go back to your opium. Pretty much. And apparently his first theory was that there had been an ice age. It happened like very quickly. Yeah, he was off by basically like night and day. And that it had followed a catastrophe, right? Yeah, I wonder if he would have,

that seems like the one thing that might have put them off was how unlikely that sounded. Right. Because he was wrong. Like I wonder if he would have said, it happened slowly over time. Let's say. Yeah, they may have said like, oh, I might buy that.

He's presenting his findings like, what do you guys wanna hear? Yeah. I'll massage it in that way. Yeah, it happened overnight and they all just crossed their arms, he goes, or. Right, overnight over a very long period of time. So before him though,

quite a few years before him, there was a Scotsman. Oh yeah? Born in Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Buried at Greyfriars Kirkyard. Wow, which, did you ever go there? I walked past it, I never made it in. Okay, well my hotel was right there,

so I walked through it. Amazing, amazing cemetery. I went to Mary King's Close instead, which is pretty awesome too. Oh, you had to go to one or the other? Right. They're close to each other. Yeah, they were.

There's only so much time in the day off. Not close enough, no. 1785, a man named James Hutton, and man, this guy was, he was a stud. The father of geology, he had this idea that, he was one of the first people to look around and say, you know what, the earth is always changing. Like if you look around and pay attention.

Look at it, that bird just died. You know, like he might sit for days and look and wait for something to move. But he said the earth is constantly changing and I have an idea that it's probably always been this way. So if we look at what's going on now and we apply that to the past, we might come up with some pretty interesting stuff here.

Right, yeah, he said that there's basically clues to the past in the present. Yeah, just like, look what's going on around you. This might have happened 10,000 years ago as well, and that might explain something like that boulder being someplace different. Exactly, and we keep going to the boulders, but the boulders are actually some really,

really high quality evidence for ice ages in general. Sure. There's actually a term for it among people who study ice ages. They're called erratics, and an erratic is a very, very heavy boulder, way too heavy to have been moved by humans. That is also too far from its point of origin

to just say, roll downhill. It doesn't make any sense that it's there, which is why it's called an erratic. There's some very famous ones. There's one in the Swiss Alps, well, I'm sure there's many, but there's one in particular, this article mentions, it's in the Swiss Alps that is about 50 miles from its point of origin.

There's one in Central Park that is many miles away from its point of origin in New Jersey. It moved, tried to make it in the big city. It was a bridge and tunnel boulder. Right, and that's actually one of the ways the Germans figured out that there was such a thing as ice age, because they said, see that boulder there in that field?

I'm pretty sure that's Scandinavian rock. And sure enough, they were correct. And so you start to put all this stuff together, huge boulders being moved. Valleys between mountains carved out in a U shape rather than that telltale V shape that a river carves out. Sure. These are clues, they're not, well, they are erratics,

but they're clues into the past. Yeah, when you start to put all of them together, the only thing that really explains them is huge massive movements of glaciers, glacial movement. Yeah, and when you study that stuff, and you look at these grooves and you study the boulders, you can actually make calculations. And it's amazing that way back then,

they were able to make these calculations. Agassiz, in particular, and some other guys got together. And they said that the present ice age, at its peak, I guess, was about a mile thick of a glacier, a mile of ice. Yes. It's amazing. Yeah, and further studies have concluded

that in the last ice age, I guess the Wisconsin glaciation, about a third of the earth was covered in glaciers. Have we said what a glacier is yet? I mean, it almost goes without saying, but just in case. Yeah, it's just really densely packed snow. It is, and it's snow that isn't allowed to melt. It's cold enough so that it never fully melts. So at the base, it forms to ice.

And on top, you've got more and more snow, and as more and more snow doesn't melt, the ice builds up thicker and thicker. And just from the sheer force of these things, mass encountering gravity, they can actually move. They're like very slow, most of the time, very slow moving rivers of ice on a massive scale. Yeah, and well, we'll get to that later.

I was gonna tease something out. Okay. Should we take a quick break? Yes. All right, we'll take a break, and we'll get back to a little more. Amazing glaciers. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we've talked about the sheer size, a mile, a mile thick of ice. Yeah, and I said like a third of the earth. I think it covered 17 million square miles of the planet during the last glaciation.

Cubic miles, my friend. Cubic miles, right, because that junk is deep. Yeah, a mile deep, man, that is nuts. So Antarctica had about 10% more ice than it does now. And the big change, the big difference, what sets that ice age apart was the amount of activity in the Northern Hemisphere. It was very unusual to have the amount of ice

in North America and Europe extending down, like through the Midwest of the United States. It was a new scene, a new chilly scene. Yeah, a whole new jam, basically. And Chuck, I mean, it was largely in North America, but this also really covered a lot of Europe, too. I mean, Ireland was covered, Germany was covered, Scandinavia was covered by ice,

and basically everything that wasn't covered by ice in Europe was a tundra, very much like Siberia is today. I actually, I saw a documentary on, I think it was a history channel show about the last ice age, and somebody figured out how much all of that ice weighed. You ready for this?

Basilion pounds. This might be more than a bazillion. 68,000 trillion tons was the total weight of the ice. Other than the earth? On the earth during the last ice age, during the last glaciers. How many big maxes that, I have no idea. It's like more than a hundred.

Well, in North America alone, about 13, I'm sorry, about 10 million square miles of ice, and this all came from the ocean, which means the ocean level was hundreds and hundreds of feet lower during the size age. Yeah, like Canada's used to having large parts of it being covered by glacier. The United States is not used to this,

but it came all the way down into the plains in some cases, and basically from New York over to Washington State, totally covered by, again, a mile thick sheet of ice. Yeah, like you can ice skate on that without worry. Yeah. You're not gonna fall through it. They're gonna crack. Did you ever do that growing up

that Ohio like in Toledo? Like you'd skate on lakes? Yeah, we were never allowed to do that until my dad went out and stomped on it, like jumped up and down, and if he didn't go through, then we were allowed to skate. He's like, kids, if I die, don't skate. It wasn't the most foolproof technique,

but it was nice of dad to do that for us. I don't know, I think I'm not much of a worry wart, but that still would have creeped me out. I've seen enough movies, you know, trapped under ice. So the Mami River would freeze over, but we weren't allowed to skate on the river. Some people did, we weren't allowed to. Instead, there was a golf course with ponds

that would freeze pretty good. There was, you weren't gonna fall through these small ponds. The ice is pretty cold. Pretty rough though, right? Like skating on it, it's not like an ice rink, is it? It depends on, and I don't remember what it depended on. Yeah, it's never like an ice rink, but certain type of weather,

maybe non-windy weather, I think is what it was. Because then, if there was kind of choppiness to it from the wind, it could freeze like that, freeze choppy. Whereas if it wasn't windy, I would guess it would be smoother. So sometimes it was pretty smooth. Other times you're like, I can't even skate on that. But your dad would drive a Zamboni out there

and fix it all up. Move it over, and if the Zamboni didn't fall through, then we were allowed to skate on it. I just pictured the Zamboni falling through, but it's a little pond, so your dad's still like, just above. He's just like knee deep. I feel like I missed out though.

I mean, not that my life is over, you can still skate on ponds. Oh, it is. I don't picture myself going to Minnesota in the winter, just to give it a try. The trade-off, it wasn't a very good trade-off. Because the winters are pretty brutal. Like if you have local ponds that freeze over,

you're cold too. Sure, I still feel like I missed out. Yeah, I mean, you're fine. It wasn't that big of a deal. I was just teasing when I said you did miss out. All right, so people are skating all over the world. A third of the world people are ice skating on during the ice age.

And like we mentioned, these things, they've been described as bulldozers just plowing through the earth basically, leaving large swaths, they call it glacial till, this debris that they leave behind. These are, once you figure out how it works, the evidence is everywhere of exactly what happened. Yeah, because as these glaciers move and that ice

that has formed the basis of the glacier is in contact with the earth below it, it's picking up all sorts of crud, that all that debris, that glacial till you said, erratic boulders. And as it's doing this, it's actually creating a scrubbing mechanism, right? So like you said, if you look around at mountains

and valleys with exposed rock that were rubbed by glaciers, there's gonna be crazy grooves worked into them. Yeah, some of them look like roads almost. Yes, some are kind of polished and rounded. And it's all from this glacier activity, rubbing stuff over the tops of these mountains. It's pretty interesting stuff. And then other things, you'll see

like a movie where this incredibly beautiful like river valley has just gravel everywhere, like just scattered all throughout like the valley floor. That's not supposed to be there. A glacier deposited that. That's right. More evidence of the ice age. Yeah, that's interesting to think of.

It's not supposed to be there. No, and you think of it like that's what that looks like. You know, of course it's supposed to be there, but no, it's technically not. Had we not had these glaciation events, that stuff wouldn't be there. Isn't that fascinating? It is.

Earth science. Is that your favorite science? I think it's become it. Yeah. Yeah, it really does get me jazzed. Yeah. All right, so it wasn't just the direct path of these glaciers that was affected

out on the edges of these massive moving sheets of ice. You had things like Arctic deserts and you had these big areas of dusty wind and there's actually a few ways to pronounce this. L-O-E-S-S. Heard everything from lowest to lowest to less. I like lowest. Yeah, I like lowest too.

Covering all over the earth basically and this is created by those glaciers just like grinding into the earth. Yeah. Just stirring everything up. Right, and then the wind just comes and picks it up, the finest of the particles and just deposits them. So in some places you had,

so if your area wasn't covered by glacier, that didn't mean you weren't affected by the glaciation. Oh no. Because you would have these lowest deserts or glacial deserts that formed and in some places the lowest was like 20 feet thick and apparently it's still there. In much of the Midwest,

the substrate below the soil is lowest deposited from these lowest deserts. And so you would think when you hear about this kind of activity that it had to be like 100 degrees chillier or 50 or 40 even, but it was only about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, about 5.6 Celsius lower than temperatures now, which it wouldn't think that that would be enough.

Right. But it's not all just about the temperature, that's kind of the point. No, the point that Molly makes is that it's not like, oh it's just so much colder than it was before all the time. The key to an ice age forming glaciers, a glacial period, is that the time when it's supposed to actually melt is colder than usual.

That's right. So that there's less melt than before and the less melt you have, the more chance you have for snow to fall and make up for whatever melted and actually add to it, which means that the glacier's growing. As long as more snow is added to the glacier than it loses during say the summer months,

your glacier's growing. Yeah, and if it's not losing much, it doesn't take much snow and this cycle starts, there's something called albedo or albedo. Albedo. And it's the reflectivity of ice. And once this ice gets going, it's reflecting away the sun.

It's why you're hotter in the summer wearing a black t-shirt than a white t-shirt. Yeah, and it's just, it creates that cycle basically where it's all just compounding, all these different elements coming together. Absolutely. To make ice super thick. So if you have a glacier form on planet Earth

and it reflects a bunch of sunlight and makes it colder, well that's gonna create the conditions for other glaciers to form too. So it has a compounding effect as well. That albedo does. All right, well, let's take a break and we're gonna come back and talk about a very famous Serbian mathematician.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so I said famous Serbian mathematician. Had you already heard of this guy? Yeah. Really? I'd heard about the Milankovitch cycles. Nice. So his name was Milutin Milankovitch.

And it's amazing to me that in the 1920s, people like, well, to say him was able to figure out with a lot of accuracy, the Milankovitch cycles. Basically, he said, you know what? I have a theory on why these summers are cooler and why this ice age happened. And it's not just the temperatures, but it's because of the sun's relationship to the Earth

and how much sun the Earth is getting during the summer months. So he came up with three different factors, the tilt in the Earth's axis, the way the Earth wobbles on that axis, and then how close we are to that heat, how close we are to the sun. He plugged those into a mathematical formula and he came up with every 22,041,000 and 100,000 years,

he's predicting that we're gonna get these ice ages. Pretty amazing math for back then. It is, especially if you go back, so he figured this out and then they went back and looked at the fossil record, the geological record, because when he was working, they didn't have this understanding. He wasn't proving that, like, yes, this is how. Right, so then about that time,

and well after that time, but in the 40s and 50s, the U.S. was building army bases all over the world in some really crazy places, including the Arctic, and some scientists went along and started taking core samples from those places, and they found air bubbles trapped in there that were from, like, a million years ago. Like, the air was a million years old

and it was untouched virgin air, and they found that they could do all sorts of stuff and learn all sorts of things from this air. And one of the things they found was the, basically the time stamp for the ice ages during the quaternary period, and they found out that in the first two million years, the first two thirds of the quaternary ice age,

the ice age's glaciation occurred every 41,000 years. Yep, and he just sat back and was like, yeah. Yeah, that's what I said. He's like, but wait for it, and they said, okay, in this most recent million years, it switched to 100,000 years. Uh-huh, and he just had his arms crossed. Yeah. Very smugly.

Yeah, and everybody said, that's amazing, that's fantastic. Scientists, you guys in the lab coats, what causes an ice age? Yeah. And there's just crickets coming back from the scientists. Yeah. And there still is today, actually. Actually, no, the opposite is true.

Not crickets, but a ton of different answers and a ton of different theories. Yeah, lots of crickets. Right. But not quite either. What would be the animal that would? Talking crickets. Jiminy crickets.

Sure. Everywhere. Man, that guy was annoying. Putting forth theories, and as with most things, we usually kind of center on, I bet it was like most of these things put together, which most scientists do. Well, dude, I was thinking about this, and I was like, yes, chaos theory.

Yeah. Like we have such a propensity as humans to be like, there's one true explanation, there's one factor that explains everything, and that is just not the case. No. This is a perfect example of that. I wonder if that's a tendency for humans

to want to be right, like the people actually doing the research, say like, no, this is my idea as the woman. I'm right. Yeah. I think that's part of it, but I think it's more just like our brains are wired to find the least common denominator to find the easiest route.

Yeah, maybe. You know, just for efficiency's sake. That makes sense. I kind of like the idea of like, I'm hands across America. Did you participate in hands across America? Not hated it back then, but I don't know about it. Now I'm just kidding.

I think I did actually. Yeah. There were huge gaps, but it was still pretty great. We should do a show on that. Okay. I didn't know there were gaps. Of course there were. Oh yeah.

Pretty big ones. Yeah. It was at no point complete. I think our school did it. Wasn't that the deal? Like you probably did it through this, oh, church. Church, hippie church.

I don't know if my church might have been like, no, we're not holding hands. You could be holding hands with an atheist. Yeah. Probably so. You wouldn't even know it. That probably would have been the case. All right, so another theory is,

we've talked a lot about plate tectonics in our G's and the volcano episodes and what else? The plate tectonics episode. Did we do one on that specifically? I think so. Among the close to 900 episodes. Man, I don't remember where it first popped up, but it's definitely come up quite a bit.

Popped up. Another one of your non-pun puns. Yes. I hope I'm creating a pretty extensive case for the fact that all of my puns are accidental. I don't think like that. Accidental puns are a good band name too, ironically. It's okay.

So plate tectonics is another theory. Basically, everyone knows when you get to a higher altitude, it's gonna be colder and the conditions are more likely for glaciers to form. And so when these plates on the earth are smashing together, everyone also knows from listening to our show that's how we get these lovely mountain ranges

and why there are higher altitudes. So that's another theory that had a lot to do with it. Yeah, they, some scientists lay the quaternary ice age, the whole shebang, that's a 2.58 million year old ice age that we're in still. Basically at the feet of the creation of the Himalayas, where Asia and India collide, creating the Himalayas, and most importantly, the Tibetan Plateau.

And this rising of land, changing the way that air moves across this huge portion of land, Eurasia, and that it had an impact on climate, which has an impact on a historical climate, which can change things, make things cold enough so that glaciers can form and really get a foothold, right?

More interesting, Chuck, is that it's, apparently that's, they're like, that's probably kind of a factor, but there's an even bigger factor that they think that came out of that upwelling of earth. Bear with me. So when earth meets earth and there's an upwelling in the four mountains or something like that, right?

You know the process of weathering? Yeah. It's like breaking in genes or a strativarius, right? You break in mountains too. Well, that's actually a chemical reaction between like the air and the earth. And when rock is exposed, it becomes weathered because CO2 reacts with the rock

to basically form some sort of equilibrium that's been interrupted or disrupted by the exposure of unweathered rock, right? Well, to carry that out, CO2 has to be drawn from the atmosphere, which means you're basically removing CO2 from the atmosphere when you create a new mountain chain. And if you're talking about a mountain chain

as extensive as the Himalayas, a lot of CO2 is gonna be removed from the atmosphere. When you remove CO2 from the atmosphere, you reduce the greenhouse effect and when you reduce the greenhouse effect, the earth becomes cooler, possibly enough for an ice age. The timing's right as well. The Himalayan's formed right before

the quaternary ice age began. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It is, earth science. The other thing is dust, atmospheric changes. A lot of dust in the air is gonna keep the sun from shining down its warmth onto the earth and keep temperatures cooler.

And since I mentioned volcanoes, there were a lot of volcanoes, a lot of activity that preceded the glacial ages. Launching a lot of dust in the air. I don't think it's coincidence. Right. It's probably all tied in together. Yeah, I would guess that.

And it's not just volcanic ash. I mean, there was just dust period, but the volcanic ash added to it, you know. Right, and I think even after the volcanoes stop erupting, gases that affect the atmosphere directly, they still interact with the water vapor in the atmosphere to mess with it in a continued way. Sunspots are also another one too, right?

Yeah, that's one of the main reasons for the little ice age, right? Yeah. That we talked about in the Stratobarous. Yeah. The little ice age. So did you see that article I sent you? Yeah, I picked through it.

It was pretty interesting, but there's a, our understanding of the little ice age, which is not the best name for it, but there's a period from- It should be Lil Ice Age, OIL, Rostropy. There's from 1300 to 1850, Europe in particular, well, the Northern Hemisphere, but Europe got it pretty bad.

It was basically what amounts to an ice age for this area. Greenland and Iceland were cut off by ice for months at a time. They used to grow wine in England. Not anymore. Scotland. They grew wine? Yeah, like bottles would just pop up out of the ground.

It's amazing. The highlands of Scotland would be locked into ice at like 1200 meters and up. Yeah, the Baltic Sea froze over. Yeah, the canals and the Netherlands routinely froze. It was a really rough time. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't. It's pretty interesting,

because this article you sent points out a lot of the history that it affected everything from shipping to crops to people turning on one another in some areas. Then other areas, things flourished. Right, so apparently areas and groups that had access to extensive trade networks, especially with the south or the tropics, Makes sense.

They flourished. But if you were in like a marginal area, say like the Alps, you were toast. Like you suffered from famine. Apparently glaciers were advancing enough that they were just overrunning towns. That's nuts. And it sounds, it sounds absolutely nuts,

but actually glaciers can move surprisingly fast, right? There was a glacier in Alaska in 1986 that was clocked advancing at 180 miles an hour. At 10 meters a day. Yeah, I mean, that's 30 feet a day. That's, you can watch that happen. Yeah, or at the very least you could set up your intervalometer camera and watch it later.

Sure. Or if you're just super patient. Yeah. I bet, what's his name? That dude, the Scotsman. I bet James Hutton would have sat there until he's, you know, patient man. What else, did we cover the sunspots?

No. Well, not, yeah. I mentioned that that might have been why the little Ice Age happened. And by the way, we on the Strativarius podcast heard from a lot of people about this double blind study that where they had musicians play the strads and then against modern violins.

And they preferred, I think, generally preferred the modern violin more. Right. So people were like, oh, you're just getting the brand name. That's kind of a reductive way to say it. Yeah. And then afterward to the violinists, they served them cough and they were like, it's Folgers.

Well, the other thing we heard from other people that said, these violinists know what they're testing. They're testing, clearly testing a Strativarius against a modern instrument. They don't just say like, put on this blindfold and here's two violins and which one smells neater. So we probably should have included that, but I don't think that like settles it

in any scientific way or anything. Yeah, I saw in our research that that was not necessarily the case. I saw in a number of different sources that they can tell a difference, that it is actually the best violins ever made. And these are people that have opinions. It's not like you can't scientifically prove that.

Cause every person you pick out is going to have a different take on the matter. And we weren't poo pooing modern instruments cause clearly they're only a handful of strads out there being played. And there are many, many orchestras and they're not playing like pawn shop violins, pawn shop fiddles.

No. So anyway, I just want to mention that. So these sunspots, there's actually a cycle that was recognized by a British astronomer named E.W. Maunder. Yeah. It's a pretty British name. And he was living during the Little Ice Age. And he noticed.

That it was cold. Yeah, he was like, holy cow, it's cold. You can ice skate on a pond. He noticed that the, so the Little Ice Age should actually be called the little period where it was pretty cold and then really, really cold in two different points. And those points were between 1290 and 1500

and then 1645 and 1715. It was really cold. Like kind of ice age-ish conditions for real. And E.W. Maunder noticed that especially the time when he was alive during this, between the 1645 and 1750 period, 1715 period, sunspots were not nearly as active. And he was like, I wonder if this correlates

to Little Ice Ages. And it would make sense even though it makes sense in a really weird way, a roundabout way actually. Yeah, sunspot, I guess we should just say what that is. It's a dark spot, a cooler spot on the sun. But the key there is it contains magnetic energy. So you would think that sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun.

So how would that, well, wait, now I've got it backwards. No, you got it. Yeah, yeah. So how would that keep it warmer on Earth? Right. But it's about that magnetic field cutting through cloud cover or cutting the cloud cover. Right, so less cloud cover means that the heat

from the sun isn't trapped, it just escapes into space. Yeah, counterintuitive, but it makes sense. Yeah, because these sunspots are big enough that when it's facing Earth, it's putting out less heat energy. So you would think it would indirectly cool it. It indirectly cools it. Right.

Weird. It is weird. But amazing. Earth science, so whether or not we're headed for another one is a lot, there's a lot of debate on that because some people say, well, there's no strict definition even what an ice age is, so who's to say? Other people say, now you know what, humans have caused

such an impact here that there probably won't be another ice age. Yeah, it's extremely possible that we have altered the climate enough that we're not gonna see, like we may have ended on our own the quaternary ice age. It may be over now, or on the way to being over, in which case we have a whole other set of problems to deal with, but not an ice age, not glaciers.

Right. There was actually a study that made the rounds, I think this year or last year, that really drummed up a lot of media attention because these researchers said that they predicted a period of very low sunspot activity in 30 years. Because we're due for one, technically, right? We're at that 10,000 year point.

Yes, yeah, we're due for another glaciation event. And these people said, well, there's gonna be sunspots in 30 years, and the media took it and said, there's gonna be another ice age in 30 years. And that's not necessarily the case, it's a pretty big leap from saying, yes, there's low sunspot activity, so we're gonna have an ice age. But if we hadn't burned all those fossil fuels,

maybe that would be the case. Maybe we would start to see glaciation beginning again in about 30 years. Again, we're probably not going to, because we've raised the temperature of the planet by a full degree Celsius since 1980. So it's possible we won't ever see an ice age again. Which is sad, because some people say

that it was this last, this ice age, not just the last glaciation event, but the quaternary ice age as a whole, that pushed humans to evolve to the wonderful, amazing specimens we are today. Yeah, I mean, a lot of advancements happen because of it, adaptations in animals and early humans. There was movement around Earth,

because the sea levels were a lot lower, so you could make your way around bigger parts of the Earth. They weren't cut off like before, like they are now. Apparently, our brains grew tremendously in size during the quaternary ice age. In a time period that correlates with it, and one hypothesis is that the cooler temperatures allowed us to dissipate heat more naturally

and to save our energy, or use more energy, which would allow our brains to grow. Interesting. And then other people say, well, you know what? The crow magnets also invented the sewing needle during this time, because of the ice age, so that they could start sewing. And clothes is the technology that allowed us

to truly spread out over the Earth. Yeah, because you could go live where it was cold. Yep, because you could make a big parka out of a musk ox. Exactly. Then musk ox would say, thank you for using me, human. I don't know about that, but you got anything else? Nope, I think that's it, man. This is good one, Chuck.

If you wanna know more about ice ages, you can type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for the listener mail. Remember in the animal testing episode when I wondered aloud about the names of pork and beef and swine and all that stuff?

Oh, yeah, I'm glad you're covering this. Apparently I'm the only person on the planet who did not know this. I didn't know it either. Because we had a bunch of people right in, and it's super interesting. So I picked one that was a good explanation from a gentleman in Bristol, United Kingdom.

Nice. And he said this, before 1066 in England, most people spoke a form of Germanic English. And he says, by the way, I'm glossing over several centuries of linguistic history with that. However, after the invasion by William McConqueror

and his eventual coordination, Norman became the dominant language. Norman is based on Northern French dialects so would have used words such as mutton and bouff for sheep and cows. These words were used by people who would have been able to afford to eat such food, namely the gentry.

However, peasants who would have raised, raised the animals still use the Germanic words like sheep and cow. And these words stuck. English is full of high and low words, gentry or peasantry, for similar meanings with the high words being French-based, therefore Latin-based.

Really interesting. I'm having to stop myself from going on as this is a subject I've always been obsessed with and I hope that I have piqued your interest as well. Be warned, the subject is a rabbit hole. I will also add I was gutted to miss your UK tour and I hope you enjoyed it enough to come back one day. Sure.

I will also cheekily plug Bristol as an amazing place to live and visit. Yeah, congratulations on your new Skype here. I've heard of that. It's like a huge observation UFO that goes up on their coast. You can just see for miles and miles. Interesting.

Much love to you both and thanks for doing what you do. Cheers, that is from Matt Galliford of Bristol. Thanks, Matt. We'll definitely be back. And thanks to everyone who wrote in with that good information. I wish I could have read them all.

If you want to get in touch with us to let us know something we missed or to tell us how great we're doing or, well, yeah, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can also hang out with me at Josh underscore um underscore clark on Twitter too. You can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. Chuck Brian on Facebook or our Stuff You Should Know page

at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can hang out with us on Instagram. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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