Related papers: Arctic East Siberia had a lower latitude in the Pl…
Mammoths lived in Arctic East Siberia. In this region there is not sufficient sunlight over the year for the growth of the plants on which these animals feed. Therefore the latitude of this region was lower before the end of the…
As is well known, during the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20'000 years ago, the ice was asymmetrically distributed around the present North Pole. It reached the region of New York, while east Siberia remained ice free. Mammoths lived in…
We propose a model for the Pleistocene Ice Age, assuming the following scenario: Between 3 Myr and 11.5 kyr BP a Mars-sized object existed which moved in a highly eccentric orbit. Originating from this object, gas clouds with a complex…
The striking asymmetry of the ice cover during the Last Global Maximum suggests that the North Pole was in Greenland and then rapidly shifted to its present position in the Arctic See. A scenario which causes such a rapid geographic polar…
The Milankovitch theory states that the orbital eccentricity, precession, and obliquity of the Earth influence our climate by modulating the summer insolation at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. Despite considerable success of…
The astronomical theory of Milankovitch relates the changes of Earth' past climate to variations in insolation caused by oscillations of the orbital parameters. However, this theory has problems to account for some major observed phenomena…
Ice sheets appeared in the northern hemisphere around 3 million years ago and glacial-interglacial cycles have paced Earth's climate since then. Superimposed on these long glacial cycles comes an intricate pattern of millennial and…
Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar…
A comparison of northern and southern hemispheric paleotemperature profiles suggests that the Bolling-Allerod Interstadial, Younger Dryas stadial, and subsequent Preboreal warming which occurred at the end of the last ice age were…
Although our solar system features predominantly circular orbits, the exoplanets discovered so far indicate that this is the exception rather than the rule. This could have crucial consequences for exoplanet climates, both because eccentric…
Since the beginning of satellite observations, the Arctic sea ice extent has shown a downward trend. The decline has been weaker in the March maximum than in the September minimum and masked by inter-annual fluctuations. One of the less…
Glaciations were attributed to variations of the Earths orbit (Milankovitch cycles). But the best ever dated paleoclimatic record (from a speleothem from Devils Hole, Nevada) demonstrated that the end of the last glacial period (termination…
Although the Earth's orbit is never far from circular, terrestrial planets around other stars might experience substantial changes in eccentricity that could lead to climate changes, including possible "phase transitions" such as the…
The model accepted is one where during the Archean Eon the Earths climate was clement despite the weaker Sun. The observational evidence that supports this concept is: the emergence of life, the existence of evaporitic sediments and the…
Hammer et al. [1997] report the presence of regularly spaced acidity peaks (H+, F-, Cl-) in the Byrd Station, Antarctica ice core. The event has a duration of about one century and falls at the beginning of the deglacial warming. Volcanism…
The Arctic sea ice represents an important energy reservoir for the climate of the northern hemisphere. The shrinking of the polar ice in the past decades decreases the stored energy and raises serious concerns about future climate…
We present a phase-space model that simulates Pleistocene ice volume changes based on Earth's orbital parameters. Terminations in the model are triggered by a combination of ice volume and orbital forcing and agree well with age estimates…
Climate variability over the past million years shows a strong glacial-interglacial cycle of ~100,000 years as a combined result of Milankovitch orbital forcing and climatic resonance. It has been suggested that anthropogenic contributions…
This thesis assesses the influence of astronomical phenomena on the Earth's biosphere and climate. I examine in particular the relevance of both the path of the Sun through the Galaxy and the evolution of the Earth's orbital parameters in…
Our solar system's path has recently been shown to potentially intersect dense interstellar clouds 2 and 7 million years ago: the Local Lynx of Cold Cloud and the edge of the Local Bubble. These clouds compressed the heliosphere, directly…