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Different big heads argue about what exactly denotes an ice age but there is somewhat of an ice age every hundred or so thousand years. It's a natural cycling.

Scientists don't know at all what drives the process of glaciation but they do know what happens to gases in the atmosphere because they take big cores of ice from Siberia and analyse the gases trapped in the little bubbles. I actually did this (not with gases from Siberia) before flatland took over my life (thanks flatland! Hahaha). What scientists do know is that when the Earth is approaching a period of cooling, levels of carbon dioxide in the atomsphere decrease. Plants use carbon dioxide to make their energy - and produce oxygen as a 'shit'. Animals, bacteria etc. use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. It's a cycle too - and life - as they say - hangs in the balance because of it. Scientists can't cool down the world so they don't know what will happen to the world in the future. They can only make predictions based on the ice core data.

The most important thing for scientists to find out is what is the driving force behind an ice age. Is it the decrease in the levels of carbon dioxide that cause the temperature to decrease or does a temperature decrease drive down carbon dioxide levels. Scientists seriously don't know what the driving force is. It's a bit like the whole chicken and egg thing. There is an answer somewhere though - The lizard-like ancestors of birds laid eggs and so the egg came first... If only this problem was as simple to solve.

The important application of finding out about ice ages is combating global warming. Since the industrial revolution temperatures have increased at a rate unseen before - in the ice core bubble data anyway that is. So what does that mean? Do we avoid the next ice age??? Well no. . . Well nobody knows actually. . . Ice ages are partly determined by subtle variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Basically if the Earth was the only planet going around the Sun then it would have a perfectly circular orbit but big bastards like Jupiter exert their own massive forces which sometimes change the shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun a bit. It's physics not biology so I don't know much about it at all. All I know is that there's a pattern and it's perfectly linked with ice ages.

What I actually did (in a past life it seems) was make small models of the world with everything in the right concentrations and try to simulate an ice age. It worked but you can't start drawing conclusions about planet Earth by looking in glass jars. What I will say is that if you plan to survive then look at becoming soil bacteria. Don't worry too much though - The cave men came out of an ice age about 20000 years ago - So as long natural cycling is a more powerful force than our Hummers, tanks and aeroplanes we're sweet for the next 80000 years right??????

In the meantime, please recycle...

Ice core samples are great recordings of goings on here on earth. These core samples are taken from Antartica also, and provide alot of info for scientists as already mentioned by Paul. As far as climate change, yes there is a strong possibility mankind is to blame for increasing natural disasters from pollution, mining and extracting everything of value from under the seabed and on land.

However, we only have accurate recordings of climate going back around 150 years or so, so its really difficult to base cycles that are possibly based on a few centuries or thousand year cycles or even more.

I had never thought of oil as lubricating the plates, but have always thought of it as weight transfers much like ballast in a ships hull. By removing massive amounts of liquids or solids from certain areas, I believe it can cause excess movement which in turn directly causes earthquakes, tremors and in turn, volcanoes. Volcanoes are caused from plates moving and releasing hot liquids from near the core, spilling out as molten lava.

There is a steady increase in not only the amount of quakes, but locations and worse, its power. Charles Richter invented the scales to measure a quakes force. This measurement from 1 - 10 is magnified ten x with each number. A quake measuring 2 on the Richter scale is 10 x more powerful than number 1. The frightening part is that if you look over the last few decades and even as far back as the sixties, the scale is slowly climbing making number 6 and 7 more commonplace.

If man is capable of increasing earthquakes, its possible we also could be responsible for very slightly altering our orbit around the sun. This in turn can increase earthquakes again.

Jupiter is our largest planet orbiting the sun in our solar system. It has 16 moons. The four largest and closest orbiting Jupiter are known as the Galileo moons. The closest of these is called Io. Io is so affected by Jupiters gravitational pull its the most volcanically active planet known. It is so volcanically active that it cannot be geographically mapped because every 24 hrs its a different shape.

This is an extreme example of how things affect each other. It shows that even slight changes in pressure, gravity, weight or orbit can cause natural disaters.

So is man responsible? I think partly so, yes. Greed is ruling and the environment is suffering. Should we panic? No. There is so much to worry about its enough to give us a stroke. [Image Can Not Be Found]

Remember, apart from ice core samples taken from the poles, our records don't go back far enough to give us dead accurate climate reports.

Enjoy your life, stess as little as possible, respect others and try your best at saving our environment.

[quote="rully":378bfleu][quote="Paradoxium":378bfleu]
Enjoy your life, stress as little as possible, respect others and try your best at saving our environment.[/quote:378bfleu]

it's just a matter of when isn't it?[/quote:378bfleu]

Everyone will have their own ideas, but no one can say for sure.