Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery
Imbrie, John and Katherine Palmer Imbrie. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. 1986. Harvard University Press.
Review by Mike Dubrasich
In 1911 at a coffee house in Belgrade, Serbia, 32-year-old mathematics professor Milutin Milankovitch resolved to “grasp the entire Universe and spread light into its farthest corners”. The occasion was a party, and he was a little drunk. But he kept his word regardless.
It took a while, what with World War I and its aftermath, cruel depression and social disruptions in the Balkans, but in 1938 Milankovitch published “Astronomical Methods for Investigating Earth’s Historical Climate”. His theory, the Milankovitch Theory [here], was that variations in the Earth’s dance around the Sun caused fluctuations in the global climate of the Ice Ages, one such fluctuation being our current Holocene.
