Growing Antarctic Ice Sheets May Have Sparked Ice Age

The origins of the last major ice age, which cloaked the Northern Hemisphere in colossal glaciers, might have had a surprising cause: the buildup of ice sheets on the other side of the planet, in Antarctica, researchers say…The findings also reveal that "a change in deep-sea heat transport had a profound effect on the Earth’s climate," said lead study author Stella Woodard, a geochemist and paleooceanographer at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Deep-sea currents are responsible for about 30 to 50 percent of global heat storage and transport. In the study, Woodard and her colleagues analyzed the shells of microscopic bottom-dwelling organisms known as foraminifera in ancient sediments in the Pacific collected by the International Ocean Discovery Program.