A New Glaciation May Have Been Starting. Around 1960, Warming Reversed It
Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, and is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. At its peak the Laurentide was the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, burying most of Canada under two miles of ice and locking away around 80 meters of sea level.
A recent Science study reports that the Laurentide reached its smallest size about 3,600 years ago, then started re-expanding roughly 2,000 years ago. The team interprets that regrowth as the opening move of the next glaciation.
The report dates the turnaround to about 1960, when human-caused climate warming reversed the trend. Put the two accounts side by side and you get an arresting ledger: some 2,000 years of ice growth on one page, a human-caused reversal in the mid-twentieth century on the next.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
There is a strange comfort in the framing: the ice was due back on its own calendar, so the cooling was going to be somebody's problem eventually. We just seem to have moved the date.
The comfort is thin, and the dates are what should bother you. A trend reported to have been running for roughly two millennia apparently flipped around 1960; the mismatch in durations is the interesting number, not the cancelled ice age.
Worth keeping the hedge visible, though: the physical evidence for a reversal is described as direct, but calling the regrowth the opening move of the next glaciation is the team's reading of it. Ice sheets are not on a published schedule.