8 / income center or profit center Aleksey Demin, director of TPK Tekhprom LLC, Novosibirsk It is necessary to give up the idea of \u200b\u200bworking on a franchise basis once and for all. So the company only helps entrepreneurs to organize someone else's business, and they can at any time

RUSSIAN CENTER UNDER IMPACT RUSSIAN CENTER UNDER IMPACT 10.10.2012

Center of Power No. 5 Center of Power No. 5 Strategic game: Islamic factor Shamil Sultanov 12.09.2012

One of the mysteries of the Earth, along with the emergence of Life on it and the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period of dinosaurs, is - Great Glaciers.

It is believed that glaciations are repeated on Earth regularly every 180-200 million years. Traces of glaciation are known in sediments, which are billions and hundreds of millions of years ago - in the Cambrian, Carboniferous, Triassic-Permian. That they could have been, the so-called tillites, breeds very similar to stained the latter, or rather recent glaciations... These are the remains of ancient glacier deposits, consisting of a clay mass with inclusions of large and small (shaded) boulders scratched during movement.

Separate layers tillitsfound even in equatorial Africa, can reach power of tens and even hundreds of meters!

Signs of glaciation were found on different continents - in Australia, South America, Africa and Indiathat is used by scientists for reconstruction of paleo-continents and often cited in confirmation plate tectonics theory.

Traces of ancient glaciations indicate that continental-scale glaciations- this is not a random phenomenon, it is a natural phenomenon that occurs under certain conditions.

The last of the ice ages began almost million years ago, in the Quaternary, or Quaternary period, the Pleistocene and was marked by the extensive distribution of glaciers - By the Great Glaciation of the Earth.

The northern part of the North American continent - the North American ice sheet, reaching a thickness of up to 3.5 km and extending to approximately 38 ° north latitude and a significant part of Europe, on which (an ice sheet up to 2.5-3 km thick) ... On the territory of Russia, the glacier descended in two huge tongues along the ancient valleys of the Dnieper and Don.

Partly glaciation also covered Siberia - there was mainly the so-called "mountain-valley glaciation", when the glaciers did not cover the entire space with a thick cover, but were only in the mountains and foothill valleys, which is associated with the sharply continental climate and low temperatures in Eastern Siberia ... But almost all of Western Siberia, due to the fact that the rivers were dammed up and their flow into the Arctic Ocean stopped, turned out to be under water, and represented a huge sea-lake.

In the Southern Hemisphere, under the ice, as now, was the entire Antarctic continent.

During the period of maximum distribution of the Quaternary glaciation, glaciers covered over 40 million km 2– about a quarter of the entire surface of the continents.

Having reached the greatest development about 250 thousand years ago, the Quaternary glaciers of the Northern Hemisphere began to gradually decrease, as the glaciation period was not continuous throughout the Quaternary period.

There is geological, paleobotanical and other evidence that glaciers disappeared several times, giving way to eras. interglacialwhen the climate was even warmer than today. However, the warm epochs were replaced by cold snaps again, and the glaciers spread again.

We are now living, apparently, at the end of the fourth era of the Quaternary glaciation.

But in Antarctica, glaciation arose millions of years before glaciers appeared in North America and Europe. In addition to climatic conditions, this was facilitated by the high continent that existed here for a long time. By the way, now, due to the fact that the thickness of the Antarctic glacier is huge, the continental bed of the “ice continent” is in some places below sea level ...

Unlike the ancient ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere, which either disappeared or reappeared, the Antarctic ice sheet changed little in size. The maximum glaciation of Antarctica was greater than the modern one, only one and a half times in volume, and not much more in area.

Now about hypotheses ... Hypotheses of why glaciations occur, and whether they were at all, hundreds, if not thousands!

The following main ones are usually put forward scientific hypotheses:

• Volcanic eruptions, leading to a decrease in the transparency of the atmosphere and cooling throughout the Earth;
• Epochs of orogeny (mountain building);
• Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which reduces the "greenhouse effect" and leads to a cooling;
• Cyclic activity of the Sun;
• Changes in the position of the Earth relative to the Sun.

But, nevertheless, the reasons for the glaciation have not been finally clarified!

It is assumed, for example, that glaciation begins when, with an increase in the distance between the Earth and the Sun, around which it revolves in a slightly elongated orbit, the amount of solar heat received by our planet decreases, i.e. Glaciation sets in when the Earth passes the point of its orbit that is most distant from the Sun.

However, astronomers believe that mere changes in the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth is not enough to start an ice age. Apparently, the fluctuation in the activity of the Sun itself is also important, which is a periodic, cyclical process, and changes every 11-12 years, with a cyclicity of 2-3 years and 5-6 years. And the largest cycles of activity, as the Soviet geographer A.V. Shnitnikov is about 1800-2000 years old.

There is also a hypothesis that the emergence of glaciers is associated with certain parts of the Universe through which our solar system passes, moving with the entire Galaxy, whether filled with gas, or by "clouds" of cosmic dust. And it is likely that the "space winter" on Earth comes when the globe is located at the point farthest from the center of our Galaxy, where there are accumulations of "cosmic dust" and gas.

It should be noted that usually before the epochs of cold snaps, there are always warming epochs, and there is, for example, the hypothesis that the Arctic Ocean, due to warming, is sometimes completely free of ice (by the way, this happens even now), there is increased evaporation from the ocean surface , streams of moist air are directed to the polar regions of America and Eurasia, and snow falls over the cold surface of the Earth, which does not have time to melt in a short and cold summer. This is how ice sheets appear on the continents.

But when, as a result of the transformation of part of the water into ice, the level of the World Ocean decreases by tens of meters, the warm Atlantic Ocean ceases to communicate with the Arctic Ocean, and it is gradually covered with ice again, evaporation from its surface abruptly stops, snow falls on the continents less and less and less, the "nutrition" of the glaciers is deteriorating, and the ice sheets begin to melt, and the level of the World Ocean rises again. And again the Arctic Ocean joins the Atlantic, and again the ice cover began to gradually disappear, i.e. the cycle of development of the next glaciation begins anew.

Yes, all these hypotheses quite possible, but so far none of them can be confirmed by serious scientific facts.

Therefore, one of the main, fundamental hypotheses is climate change on the Earth itself, which is associated with the above hypotheses.

But it is quite possible that the processes of glaciation are associated with the combined impact of various natural factorswhich could act both jointly and replace each other, and it is important that, having begun, glaciation, like a "winding clock", is already developing independently, according to its own laws, sometimes even "ignoring" some climatic conditions and patterns.

And the ice age that began in the Northern Hemisphere about 1 million years back, not finished yet, and we, as already mentioned, live in a warmer period of time, in interglacial.

Throughout the entire epoch of the Great Glaciers of the Earth, the ice either retreated or advanced again. On the territory of both America and Europe, there were apparently four global ice ages, between which there were relatively warm periods.

But the complete retreat of the ice occurred only about 20 - 25 thousand years ago, but in some areas the ice lingered even longer. The glacier retreated from the area of \u200b\u200bmodern St. Petersburg only 16 thousand years ago, and in some places in the North, small remnants of ancient glaciation have survived to this day.

Note that modern glaciers cannot be compared with the ancient glaciation of our planet - they occupy only about 15 million square meters. km, that is, less than one-thirtieth of the earth's surface.

How can you determine whether there was glaciation in a given place on the Earth, or not? Usually it is quite easy to determine by the peculiar forms of geographic relief and rocks.

In the fields and forests of Russia, large accumulations of huge boulders, pebbles, boulders, sands and clays are often found. They usually lie right on the surface, but they can be seen in ravine cliffs and in the slopes of river valleys.

By the way, one of the first who tried to explain how these deposits were formed was the outstanding geographer and anarchist-theorist, Prince Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin. In his work "Studies on the Ice Age" (1876), he argued that the territory of Russia was once covered with huge ice fields.

If we look at the physical and geographical map of European Russia, then in the location of the hills, hills, hollows and valleys of large rivers, you can see some patterns. So, for example, the Leningrad and Novgorod regions from the south and east are, as it were, limited Valdai Uplandin the form of an arc. This is exactly the line where in the distant past a huge glacier, advancing from the north, stopped.

To the southeast of the Valdai Upland is the slightly winding Smolensk-Moscow Upland, stretching from Smolensk to Pereslavl-Zalessky. This is another of the boundaries of the distribution of ice sheets.

On the West Siberian Plain, numerous hilly, winding hills are also visible - "Manes" also evidence of the activity of ancient glaciers, or rather glacial waters. Many traces of stopping moving glaciers flowing down the mountain slopes into large hollows have been found in Central and Eastern Siberia.

It is difficult to imagine ice several kilometers thick on the site of today's cities, rivers and lakes, but, nevertheless, the glacial plateaus were not inferior in height to the Urals, the Carpathians or the Scandinavian mountains. These gigantic and, moreover, mobile ice masses influenced the entire natural environment - relief, landscapes, river runoff, soils, vegetation and wildlife.

It should be noted that on the territory of Europe and the European part of Russia from the geological epochs preceding the Quaternary period - the Paleogene (66-25 million years) and the Neogene (25-1.8 million years), practically no rocks were preserved, they were completely eroded and redeposited during the Quaternary, or as it is often called, pleistocene.

Glaciers originated and moved from Scandinavia, the Kola Peninsula, the Polar Urals (Pai-Khoi) and the islands of the Arctic Ocean. And almost all the geological deposits that we see on the territory of Moscow - moraine, more precisely moraine loams, sands of various origins (water-glacial, lacustrine, river), huge boulders, as well as cover loams - all this is evidence of the powerful impact of the glacier.

On the territory of Moscow, traces of three glaciations can be distinguished (although there are many more of them - different researchers distinguish from 5 to several dozen periods of advances and retreats of ice):

• oka (about 1 million years ago),
• dnieper (about 300 thousand years ago),
• moscow (about 150 thousand years ago).

Valdaithe glacier (disappeared only 10 - 12 thousand years ago) did not reach Moscow, and the deposits of this period are characterized by water-glacial (fluvio-glacial) deposits - mainly sands of the Meshchera lowland.

And the names of the glaciers themselves correspond to the names of those places to which the glaciers reached - to the Oka, Dnieper and Don, Moskva River, Valdai, etc.

Since the thickness of the glaciers reached almost 3 km, one can imagine what a colossal work he did! Some of the hills and hills on the territory of Moscow and the Moscow region are thick (up to 100 meters!) Deposits brought by the glacier.

The most famous, for example Klinsko-Dmitrovskaya moraine ridge, some elevations on the territory of Moscow ( Vorobyovy Gory and Teplostan Upland). Huge boulders weighing up to several tons (for example, the Maiden Stone in Kolomenskoye) are also the result of the work of the glacier.

Glaciers smoothed out the unevenness of the relief: they destroyed hills and ridges, and with the formed debris of rocks they filled depressions - river valleys and lake basins, transferring huge masses of stone debris over a distance of more than 2 thousand km.

However, huge masses of ice (given its colossal thickness) pressed so hard on the underlying rocks that even the strongest of them could not withstand and collapsed.

Their fragments were frozen into the body of a moving glacier and, like emery, for tens of thousands of years scratched the rocks composed of granites, gneisses, sandstones and other rocks, working out depressions in them. Numerous glacial grooves, "scars" and glacial polishing on granite rocks, as well as long hollows in the earth's crust, subsequently occupied by lakes and swamps, have survived to this day. An example is the countless depressions of the lakes of Karelia and the Kola Peninsula.

But the glaciers plowed out not all rocks on their way. Destruction was mainly carried out in those areas where ice sheets originated, grew, reached a thickness of more than 3 km, and from where they began to move. The main center of glaciation in Europe was Fennoscandia, which includes the Scandinavian mountains, the plateaus of the Kola Peninsula, as well as the plateaus and plains of Finland and Karelia.

On its way, the ice was saturated with fragments of destroyed rocks, and they gradually accumulated both inside the glacier and under it. When the ice melted, masses of debris, sand and clay remained on the surface. This process was especially active when the movement of the glacier stopped and its fragments began to melt.

At the edge of glaciers, as a rule, water flows arose, moving along the ice surface, in the body of the glacier and under the ice. Gradually they merged, forming whole rivers, which for thousands of years formed narrow valleys and washed away a lot of debris.

As already mentioned, the forms of glacial relief are very diverse. For moraine plains characterized by a lot of ridges and shafts, denoting the places where the moving ice stops and the main relief form among them is shafts of terminal moraines,usually these are low arcuate ridges composed of sand and clay with an admixture of boulders and pebbles. Depressions between the ridges are often occupied by lakes. Sometimes among the moraine plains you can see renegades - boulders hundreds of meters in size and weighing tens of tons, gigantic pieces of the glacier bed, carried over huge distances.

Glaciers often blocked river flows and near such "dams" huge lakes appeared, filling the depressions of river valleys and depressions, which often changed the direction of river flow. And although such lakes existed for a relatively short time (from one thousand to three thousand years), they managed to accumulate at their bottom. lake clays, layered sediments, counting the layers of which, it is possible to clearly distinguish the periods of winter and summer, as well as how many years these sediments have accumulated.

In the era of the latter, valdai glaciation emerged Upper Volga periglacial lakes (Mologo-Sheksninskoe, Tverskoe, Verkhne-Molozhskoe, etc.). At first, their waters had a flow to the southwest, but with the retreat of the glacier, they were able to flow to the north. The traces of Molo-Sheksninskoe Lake remained in the form of terraces and coastlines at an altitude of about 100 m.

Traces of ancient glaciers are very numerous in the mountains of Siberia, the Urals, and the Far East. As a result of ancient glaciation, 135-280 thousand years ago, sharp peaks of mountains - "gendarmes" appeared in Altai, in the Sayan Mountains, the Baikal region and Transbaikalia, on the Stanovoye Upland. The so-called "mesh type of glaciation" prevailed here, i.e. if one could see from a bird's eye view, one could see how ice-free plateaus and mountain peaks rise against the background of glaciers.

It should be noted that during the periods of glacial epochs, quite large ice massifs were located in part of Siberia, for example, on the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, in the Byrranga mountains (Taimyr peninsula), as well as on the Putorana plateau in northern Siberia.

The extensive mountain-valley glaciation was 270-310 thousand years ago Verkhoyansk ridge, Okhotsk-Kolyma Upland and in the Chukotka Mountains... These areas are considered to be centers of Siberian glaciers.

The traces of these glaciers - numerous bowl-shaped depressions of mountain peaks - circuses or punishments, huge moraine ramparts and lake plains in the place of melted ice.

In the mountains, as well as on the plains, lakes arose near ice dams, periodically the lakes overflowed, and gigantic masses of water through low watersheds rushed into neighboring valleys with incredible speed, crashing into them and forming huge canyons and gorges. For example, in Altai, in the Chuisko-Kurai depression, there are still preserved “giant ripples”, “drilling pots”, gorges and canyons, huge blocks-rejects, “dry waterfalls” and other traces of water flows escaping from the ancient lakes “all just "12-14 thousand years ago.

"Invading" from the north to the plains of Northern Eurasia, the ice sheets either penetrated far to the south along relief depressions, then stopped at any obstacles, for example, hills.

Probably, it is still impossible to determine exactly which of the glaciations was "the greatest", however, it is known, for example, that the Valdai glacier was sharply inferior in area to the Dnieper one.

The landscapes at the boundaries of the ice sheets also differed. So, in the Oka glaciation era (500-400 thousand years ago) to the south of them there was a strip of Arctic deserts about 700 km wide - from the Carpathians in the west to the Verkhoyansk ridge in the east. Even further, 400-450 km to the south, stretched cold forest steppewhere only such unpretentious trees as larch, birch and pine could grow. It was only at the latitude of the Northern Black Sea region and Eastern Kazakhstan that relatively warm steppes and semi-deserts began.

During the era of the Dnieper glaciation, the glaciers were significantly larger. A tundra steppe (dry tundra) with a very harsh climate stretched along the edge of the ice cover. The average annual temperature approached minus 6 ° С (for comparison: in the Moscow region the average annual temperature is currently about + 2.5 ° С).

The open space of the tundra, where there was little snow in winter and severe frosts, cracked, forming the so-called "permafrost polygons", which in plan resemble a wedge. They are called “ice wedges, and in Siberia they often reach a height of ten meters! The traces of these "ice wedges" in ancient glacial deposits "speaks" of a harsh climate. Traces of permafrost, or cryogenic impact are also visible in the sands, these are often disturbed, as if "torn" layers, often with a high content of iron minerals.

Ice-water deposits with traces of cryogenic impact

The last "Great Glaciation" has been studied for over 100 years. Many decades of hard work by outstanding researchers have gone into collecting data on its distribution on the plains and in the mountains, on mapping end-moraine complexes and traces of glacial-dammed lakes, glacial scars, drumlins, and areas of "hilly moraine".

True, there are researchers who generally deny the ancient glaciations, and consider the glacial theory to be erroneous. In their opinion, there was no glaciation at all, but there was "a cold sea on which icebergs floated," and all glacial deposits are just bottom sediments of this shallow sea!

Other researchers, "recognizing the general validity of the theory of glaciations," nevertheless, doubt the correctness of the conclusion about the grandiose scale of glaciations of the past, and they especially strongly mistrust the conclusion about the ice sheets that overlapped the polar continental shelves, they believe that there were "small the ice caps of the Arctic archipelagos, "bare tundra" or "cold seas", and in North America, where the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, the "Lavrentievsky ice sheet," has long been restored, there were only "groups of glaciers that merged with the bases of domes."

For Northern Eurasia, these researchers recognize only the Scandinavian ice sheet and isolated "ice caps" of the Polar Urals, Taimyr and the Putorana plateau, and in the mountains of temperate latitudes and Siberia - only valley glaciers.

And some scientists, on the contrary, "reconstruct" "giant ice sheets" in Siberia, which are not inferior in size and structure to the Antarctic.

As we have already noted, in the Southern Hemisphere, the Antarctic ice sheet spread over the entire continent, including its submarine margins, in particular the Ross and Weddell Seas.

The maximum height of the Antarctic ice sheet was 4 km, i.e. was close to modern (now about 3.5 km), the ice area increased to almost 17 million square kilometers, and the total ice volume reached 35-36 million cubic kilometers.

Two more large ice sheets were in South America and New Zealand.

The Patagonian Ice Sheet was located in the Patagonian Andes, their foothills and on the neighboring continental shelf. The picturesque fjord relief of the Chilean coast and the residual ice sheets of the Andes remind of it today.

New Zealand's South Alpine Complex - was a miniature copy of the Patagonian. It had the same shape and also extended to the shelf; on the coast, it developed a system of similar fjords.

In the Northern Hemisphere during periods of maximum glaciation, we would see huge Arctic ice capresulting from the merger North American and Eurasian covers into a single glacial system, moreover, floating ice shelves played an important role, especially the Central Arctic, which covered the entire deep-water part of the Arctic Ocean.

Largest elements of the Arctic ice sheet were the Laurentian Shield of North America and the Kara Shield of Arctic Eurasia, they had the shape of giant plano-convex domes. The center of the first of them was located above the southwestern part of Hudson Bay, the summit rose to a height of more than 3 km, and its eastern edge extended to the outer edge of the continental shelf.

The Kara ice sheet occupied the entire area of \u200b\u200bthe modern Barents and Kara seas, its center lay over the Kara Sea, and the southern marginal zone covered the entire north of the Russian Plain, Western and Central Siberia.

Of the other elements of the Arctic cover, special attention deserves East Siberian ice sheetwhich was distributed on the shelf of the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi seas and was larger than the Greenland ice sheet... He left footprints in the form of large glacial dislocations Novosibirsk Islands and Tiksi region, are also associated with it grandiose glacial-erosional forms of Wrangel Island and the Chukchi Peninsula.

So, the last ice sheet of the Northern Hemisphere, consisted of more than a dozen large ice sheets and many smaller ones, as well as of the ice shelves that united them, floating in the deep ocean.

The time intervals in which glaciers disappeared or shrank by 80-90% are called interglacials. Landscapes freed from ice in a relatively warm climate were transformed: the tundra retreated to the northern coast of Eurasia, and taiga and deciduous forests, forest-steppe and steppes occupied a position close to the present.

Thus, over the past million years, the nature of Northern Eurasia and North America has repeatedly changed its appearance.

Boulders, crushed stone and sand, frozen into the bottom layers of a moving glacier, playing the role of a giant "file", smoothed, polished, scratched granites and gneisses, and under the ice formed a kind of strata of boulder loams and sands, characterized by high density associated with the effect of glacial load - main, or bottom moraine.

Since the size of the glacier is determined equilibriumbetween the amount of snow falling on it annually, which turns into firn, and then into ice, and what does not have time to melt and evaporate during warm seasons, then when the climate warms, the edges of the glaciers retreat to new, "equilibrium boundaries." The end parts of the glacial tongues stop moving and gradually melt, and boulders, sand and loam included in the ice are released, forming a ridge that repeats the outlines of the glacier - terminal moraine; the other part of the clastic material (mainly sand and clay particles) is carried away by streams of melt water and is deposited around in the form fluvioglacial sandy plains (zandrov).

Similar flows operate in the depths of glaciers, filling cracks and intraglacial caverns with fluvioglacial material. After the melting of glacial tongues with such filled voids on the earth's surface, chaotic heaps of hills of various shapes and compositions remain on top of the thawed bottom moraine: ovoid (when viewed from above) drumlinselongated like railway embankments (along the axis of the glacier and perpendicular to the terminal moraines) ozy and irregular shape kama.

All these forms of the glacial landscape are very clearly represented in North America: the border of the ancient glaciation is marked here by a terminal moraine wall with heights of up to fifty meters, stretching across the entire continent from its eastern coast to its western one. To the north of this “Great Ice Wall”, glacial deposits are represented mainly by moraine, and to the south of it - by a “cloak” of fluvioglacial sands and pebbles.

As for the territory of the European part of Russia, four epochs of glaciation are identified, so for Central Europe, four glacial epochs are also identified, named after the corresponding alpine rivers - günz, mindel, riess and wurm, and in North America - nebraska, Kansas, Illinois and Wisconsin glaciations.

Climate periglacial (the surrounding glacier) territories were cold and dry, which is fully confirmed by paleontological data. In these landscapes, a very specific fauna arises with a combination cryophilic (cold-loving) and xerophilic (dry-loving) plants – tundra steppe.

Now similar natural zones, similar to periglacial ones, have been preserved in the form of the so-called relict steppes - islets among the taiga and forest-tundra landscape, for example, the so-called alases Yakutia, southern slopes of the mountains of northeastern Siberia and Alaska, as well as the cold arid highlands of Central Asia.

Tundra steppediffered in that its the grass layer was formed mainly not by mosses (as in the tundra), but by cereals, and it was here that the cryophilic variant herbaceous vegetation with a very high biomass of grazing ungulates and predators - the so-called "mammoth fauna".

In its composition, various types of animals were bizarrely mixed, as characteristic of tundra – reindeer, caribou deer, musk ox, lemmings, for steppes - saiga, horse, camel, bison, ground squirrels, and mammoths and woolly rhinos, saber-toothed tiger - smilodon, and the giant hyena.

It should be noted that many climatic changes were repeated as if "in miniature" in the memory of mankind. These are the so-called "Little Ice Ages" and "Interglacials".

For example, during the so-called "Little Ice Age" from 1450 to 1850, glaciers were advancing everywhere, and their size exceeded modern ones (snow cover appeared, for example, in the mountains of Ethiopia, where it is not present now).

And in the preceding "Little Ice Age" Atlantic optimum(900-1300 years), on the contrary, the glaciers shrank, and the climate was noticeably milder than the current one. Let us remember that it was during these times that the Vikings called Greenland "Green Land", and even settled it, and also reached the coast of North America and the island of Newfoundland on their boats. And Novgorod merchants-ushkuiniks passed the "Northern Sea Route" to the Gulf of Ob, founding the city of Mangazeya there.

And the last retreat of glaciers, which began over 10 thousand years ago, remained well in the memory of people, hence the legends of the Flood, so a huge amount of melt water rushed down to the south, rains and floods became frequent.

In the distant past, the growth of glaciers took place in epochs with low air temperatures and increased moisture, the same conditions developed in the last centuries of the last era and in the middle of the last millennium.

And about 2.5 thousand years ago, a significant cooling of the climate began, the Arctic islands were covered with glaciers, in the Mediterranean and Black Sea countries at the turn of the era, the climate was colder and wetter than it is now.

In the Alps in the 1st millennium BC. e. glaciers moved to lower levels, blocked mountain passes with ice and destroyed some high-lying villages. It was during this era that glaciers in the Caucasus are sharply activated and grow.

But by the end of the 1st millennium, climate warming began again, mountain glaciers retreated in the Alps, the Caucasus, Scandinavia and Iceland.

The climate began to seriously change again only in the 14th century, glaciers began to grow rapidly in Greenland, the summer thawing of soils became more and more short-lived, and by the end of the century permafrost was firmly established here.

From the end of the 15th century, the growth of glaciers began in many mountainous countries and polar regions, and after the relatively warm 16th century, severe centuries began, and were called the "Little Ice Age". In the south of Europe, severe and long winters often repeated, in 1621 and 1669 the Bosphorus froze, and in 1709 the Adriatic Sea froze near the coast. But the "Little Ice Age" ended in the second half of the 19th century and a relatively warm era began, which continues today.

Note that the warming of the 20th century is especially pronounced in the polar latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and fluctuations in glacial systems are characterized by the percentage of advancing, stationary and receding glaciers.

For example, for the Alps, there are data covering the entire past century. If the share of advancing alpine glaciers in the 40-50s of the XX century was close to zero, then in the mid 60s of the XX century about 30% came here, and at the end of the 70s of the XX century - 65-70% of the surveyed glaciers.

Their similar state indicates that the anthropogenic (technogenic) increase in the content of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases and aerosols in the atmosphere in the 20th century did not affect the normal course of global atmospheric and glacial processes in any way. However, at the end of the last, twentieth century, everywhere in the mountains, glaciers began to retreat, and the ice of Greenland began to melt, which is associated with climate warming, and which especially increased in the 1990s.

It is known that the now increased technogenic amount of emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, freon and various aerosols into the atmosphere seems to contribute to a decrease in solar radiation. In this regard, “voices” appeared first of journalists, then politicians, and then scientists about the beginning of a “new ice age”. Environmentalists "sounded the alarm", fearing "impending anthropogenic warming" due to the constant growth of carbon dioxide and other impurities in the atmosphere.

Yes, it is well known that an increase in CO 2 leads to an increase in the amount of retained heat and thereby increases the air temperature at the Earth's surface, forming the notorious "greenhouse effect".

Some other gases of technogenic origin also have the same effect: freons, nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides, methane, ammonia. But, nevertheless, not all carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere: 50-60% of industrial CO2 emissions go into the ocean, where they are quickly absorbed by animals (corals in the first place), and of course are absorbed by plants.– remember the process of photosynthesis: plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen! Those. the more carbon dioxide, the better, the higher the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere! By the way, this has already happened in the history of the Earth, in the Carboniferous period ... Therefore, even a multiple increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot lead to the same multiple increase in temperature, since there is a certain natural regulation mechanism that dramatically slows down the greenhouse effect at high concentrations of CO2.

So all the numerous "scientific hypotheses" about the "greenhouse effect", "rising sea levels", "changes in the course of the Gulf Stream", and of course "the coming Apocalypse" are mostly imposed on us "from above", politicians, incompetent scientists, illiterate journalists or simply scammers from science. The more you intimidate the population, the easier it is to sell goods and manage ...

But in fact, an ordinary natural process takes place - one stage, one climatic epoch is replaced by another, and there is nothing strange about it ... And the fact that natural disasters occur, and that there are supposedly more of them - tornadoes, floods, etc. - so another 100-200 years ago, vast areas of the Earth were simply uninhabited! And now there are more than 7 billion people, and they often live where floods and tornadoes are possible - along the banks of rivers and oceans, in the deserts of America! Moreover, let us remember that natural disasters have always existed, and even destroyed entire civilizations!

As for the opinion of scientists, which politicians and journalists alike love to refer to ... Back in 1983, American sociologists Randall Collins and Sal Restivo, in their famous article "Pirates and Politicians in Mathematics", wrote in plain text: "... There is no fixed set of norms that guide the behavior of scientists. Only the activity of scientists (and other types of intellectuals correlated with them) is unchanged, aimed at acquiring wealth and fame, as well as at obtaining the opportunity to control the flow of ideas and impose their own ideas on others ... The ideals of science do not predetermine scientific behavior, but arise from the struggle for individual success in different conditions of competition ... ".

And a little more about science ... Various large companies often provide grants for the so-called "scientific research" in certain areas, but the question arises - how competent is the person conducting the research in this area? Why was he chosen out of hundreds of scientists?

And if a certain scientist, “a certain organization” orders, for example, “a certain research on the safety of nuclear power”, then it goes without saying that this scientist will have to “listen” to the customer, since he has “well-defined interests”, and it is understandable that "his conclusions" he will most likely "adjust" to the customer, since the main question is already not a question of scientific research– and what the customer wants to get, what result... And if the result of the customer will not suit, then this scientist will not be invited again, and not in any "serious project", i.e. "Monetary", he will no longer participate, since they will invite another scientist, more "agreeable" ... Much, of course, depends on the civic position, and professionalism, and reputation as a scientist ... But let's not forget how much they "receive" in Russia scientists ... Yes, in the world, in Europe and in the USA, a scientist lives mainly on grants ... And any scientist also “wants to eat”.

In addition, the data and opinions of one scientist, even a major specialist in his field, are not a fact! But if the research is confirmed by some scientific groups, institutes, laboratories, etc. oh only then can research be worthy of serious attention.

Unless, of course, these "groups", "institutes" or "laboratories" were not funded by the customer of this research or project ...

A.A. Kazdym,
candidate of geological and mineralogical sciences, member of the Moscow Institute of Natural Sciences

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GLACIATION CENTER - the region of the largest congestion and the most powerful. ice, from where it begins to spread. Usually C. about. associated with elevated, often mountainous centers. So, C. about. of the Fennoscandian ice sheet were Scandinavian. On the territory of northern Sweden, it reached powerful. not less than 2-2.5 km. From here it spread over the Russian Plain for several thousand km to the Dnepropetrovsk region. During the Pleistocene glacial epochs, many central oceans existed on all continents, for example, in Europe - the Alpine, Pyrenean, Caucasian, Ural, and Novaya Zemlya; in Asia - Taimyr. Putoransky, Verkhoyansky, etc.

Geological Dictionary: in 2 volumes. - M .: Nedra. Edited by K.N.Paffengolts and others.. 1978 .

See what the "GLACIER CENTER" is in other dictionaries:

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Collier's Encyclopedia

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