A recent study in the journal Science traces the natural cycles of the Earth's climate over a period of one million years. The international research team analysed sediment core data and looked at past climate changes between ice ages and interglacial periods.
The international team, led by Cardiff University and involving the Alfred Wegener Institute, has made its prediction based on a new interpretation of small changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun that lead to massive shifts in the planet's climate over periods of thousands of years. In their study, the researchers analysed climate records from deep-sea sediments going back one million years, based on oxygen isotope data from benthic foraminifera and documenting changes in the size of land-based ice sheets in the northern hemisphere together with the temperature of the deep sea.
Detailed information can be found in this press release from Cardiff University.
Original publication:
Stephen Barker, Lorraine E. Lisiecki, Gregor Knorr, Sophie Nuber, Polychronis C. Tzedakis: Distinct roles for precession, obliquity, and eccentricity in Pleistocene 100-kyr glacial cycles, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adp3491