Ice Age vs Cosmic Ray Flux

The Milky Way Galaxy's Spiral Arms and Ice-Age Epochs and the Cosmic Ray Connection

By Nir J. Shaviv
The main result of this research, is that the variations of the flux, as predicted from the galactic model and as observed from the Iron meteorites is in sync with the occurrence of ice-age epochs on Earth. The agreement is both in period and in phase: (1) The observed period of the occurrence of ice-age epochs on Earth is 145 ± 7 Myr (compared with 143 ± 10 Myrs for the Cosmic ray flux variations), (2) The mid point of the ice-age epochs is predicted to lag by 31 ± 8 Myr and observed to lag by 33 ± 20 Myr. This can be seen in the first figure.

A second agreement is in the long term activity: On one hand there were no ice-age epochs observed on Earth between 1 and 2 billion years ago. On the other hand, it appears that the star formation rate in the Milky way was about 1/2 of its average between 1 billion and 2 billion year ago, while it was higher in the past 1 billion years, and between 2 to 3 billion years ago.

Another point worth mentioning is that, unlike some articles which misquote me (or copy from a misquoting article), I don't think we wont have an ice age coming in the coming few tens of millions of years. If this galactic-climate picture is correct (and you should judge yourself from the evidence, in particular by the paper in New Astronomy), it implies that we are at the end of a several 10 million year long "icehouse" epoch during which we have ice-ages come and go, and gradually over the next few millions of years, the severity of ice-ages should diminish, until they will disappear altogether. I wouldn't buy real estate in Northern Canada just yet.

http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages