ANOTHER ICE AGE COMING.

Golden Bay Argus, Volume X, Issue 89, 14 February 1907, Page 2

ANOTHER ICE AGE COMING .

Speak no more of the glacial epoch as 80,000 years agone. The glacial epoch is ahead. Sir Robert Ball says that the next ice age is duo in 200,000 years. In the course of long periods the earth’s orbit round the sun'changes from being nearly a circle, as it is now, to a long ellipse or oval, and in the last case the summer may be only 166 days long, while the winter lasts 199 days. There is a short hot summer, followed by a long, excessively cold winter, so that more ice is formed in the cold than can be inefted in the warm season.

On purely astronomical grounds, even if geologists had not discovered the ice ages from the records of the globe’s surface, astronomers wofild have demonstrated that ice ages must have happened. When the next chilly epoch arrives posterity may see all Northern Europe under an ice-cap that will o’ertop the highest mountains and last for maniy thousands of years.