Does this lead to some occurrence such as a mass extinction or something of that nature?
Seems interesting.
I have no doubt there will be dozens of astrology videos about this on YouTube within a few days.
Why would this be the case?
Perhaps another explanation for climate change.
(I keep checking the comments of this article hoping that someone knowledgable can explain how this impacts the climate.)
Basically it's not measurable within a lifetime and the signal of human interaction with the climate is magnitudes higher.
Accordingly we should expect the current interglacial to end "soon" and enormously thick ice sheets shall grow again -- we're 12k years into the Holocene; the last interglacial lasted 15k years.
Well, that number is new, to me at least, but the principle was well known before, I assume?
I don't get it.. don't they teach basic astronomy in schools anymore?
> it will give scientists a much more accurate method of dating prehistorical events — the dates of fossils, for example.
> “The dream is have a framework independent of the fossils that you can plug the fossils into and see more interesting things — the coexistence of disparate forms, or of similar forms widely separated in location. Now we can place things more accurately in time rather than depending on the fossils to tell us what the time is.”
It's also fascinating to see how it was done:
>By comparing the amount of decay of uranium to that of lead trapped in zircon, the layers in the Arizona core can be dated quite accurately.
Not in Ontario, Canada, they don't...
I had to get accepted into a university and then apply for first year astronomy to get any basic astronomy instruction whatsoever.
In the context of climate change, when Earth's orbit becomes more eccentric (our path over the next 200k years) seasonal changes increase in magnitude.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Orbital_sh...
Isn't that only so on one of the hemispheres? Right now, earth is slightly further away from the sun when its summer on the northern hemisphere which means that our summers are some 5-7 days longer than our winters and our seasons are actually less intense here.
In a circular orbit, the seasonal variation is driven solely by the axial tilt and relative hemispherical insolation bought about by earth’s own shadow, and angle of the sun to terrain.
With a variable distance from the sun, the seasons become erratic, as these two variables precess out of sync - you end up with winters in one hemisphere where the earth is close to the sun, making for mild winter and scorching summer in the other hemisphere. Equally you end up with the earth far from the sun, and bitter winters and cool summers. Finally, you have the precessions 180 degrees out of sync, and you end up with almost no seasonal variation.
So - it makes the overall swings far more extreme, but in some phases can result in milder seasons.
