Hello Internet - what’s going on - and welcome back to the most inquisitive channel on YouTube,
Life’s Biggest Questions - the place where we set our compass to True North, hitch on
our snow cleats and take up the mammoth trek of an Arctic apocalypse.
Today - as per usual, I’ll be your host Jack Finch - as we say goodbye to sunshine,
cower under the cover of a meteorological meltdown, spark up the furnace a pray to high
heaven that we don’t lose another finger - and cautiously ask the question - What If
Another Ice Age Happened?
Roll the clip.
Yeah - that clips probably a little bit of an over exaggeration - Ice Ages don’t just
happen overnight, and they definitely don’t just happen over a matter of minutes - but
you get the picture.
Technically speaking - we’re in an Ice Age right this minute.
Before we get into that though, you know the drill by now - if you’re a fan of this video
- or just LBQ in general, go ahead and hit that thumbs up button - because you know we
won’t hold it against you.
Also, be sure to share this video with your nearest and dearest - perhaps even that special
person that you’d choose to wait out an Ice Age with.
Aww.
So what exactly is an ice age, anyway?
Or at least - how do they happen?
Well strap on your science helmets, because we’re going to find out, in recent history
- that is.
Because, you know, the last /proper/ Ice Age finished like 12’000 years ago.
In short - it’s a long and complicated process.
500 years ago, though, we saw a period of low solar activity - termed the Maunder Minimum
- a phrase coined after astronomers Walter and Annie Maunder discovered that the planets
axis was affected by a shortage of sunspots between 1645 and 1715 - and thus resulted
in a mini ice-age.
In a full blown ice age, though - this process takes thousands of years to even begin.
It’s triggered when summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere fail to rise above
freezing for a number of years.
The cause of which is generally up for debate.
Milankovitch cycles, tectonic plates, fluctuations in ocean currents - that all potentially result
in the same thing.
Meaning in short, that winter snowfall doesn’t melt - and starts to build up - compressing
over time and glaciating into ice sheets.
Over thousands of years these ice sheets build up - and before you know it, it’s starting
to feel pretty damn chilly.
For the last million years or so - this has been happening roughly every 100 thousand
years - and guess what?
Technically speaking, we’re due another cold snap right about now.
The difference?
Yeah - humanity in general and our damn pesky methane emissions.
It’s a stark fact that humanity's industrial society has been warming the planet to an
unprecedented scale.
Since 1998 our climate has accumulated 2.6 billion atomic bombs worth of heat - and it’s
still getting hotter.
Generally speaking - it’s considered by many people in the scientific community evidence
enough that we may have accidentally thwarted the next ice age - but at what cost?
The Arctic permafrost is degrading, the Arctic sea ice is melting - and the Greenland ice
sheet is losing its mass at an accelerated rate.
It’s a song that is less ice - and more fire.
But let’s say we’ve got it all wrong and we throw science straight out of the window
- let’s say an Ice Age is looming it's frozen head just around the corner - and in the next
50 years, the planet is a frigid imposter of its former self, and things can only get
colder.
How would we fare?
What would the population look like?
Without a doubt, it would have some pretty insane consequences for our civilization.
Irreversible consequences that would change the course of mankind’s future.
Kicking off - it’d be the obvious, a damn sight colder than it is now.
All your friends that complain that they’re chilly, even though it’s warm as hell?
Yeah, they’ll probably be dead unless they could acclimatise to some pretty negative
temperatures.
In all likelihood - we’d begin to see major changes in the Northern hemisphere - particularly
areas like Canada and the United States, Greenland, the whole of Northern Asia and most of Northern
Europe.
Huge regions inhabited by millions of people would become completely and utterly uninhabitable
- covered in thick ice sheets and a savage, frigid climate.
What would that do to the population?
Well - quite a bit.
If not during the initial stages of a completely different planet, the population of planet
Earth would inevitably dwindle to a much smaller, more colder bunch.
This place, here - Ny-Alesund in Svalbard - the Northernmost town in the world?
Poof, gone.
Covered in Ice like a White Walker version of Vesuvius.
Grise Fiord in Nunavut, the Northernmost settlement in Canada?
Poof, gone.
At the best of times, these habitats are a grueling, merciless place to live - in an
Ice Age they’d be relegated to the encroaching ice of an apocalyptic snowdown.
For the survivors of an Ice Age, our infrastructure would be a thing of the past.
It would be down to a complete coin toss as to whether we could support our remaining
humans.
For the most part - a lot less agricultural land would be available - and by a lot less,
we mean almost none.
It would be very difficult to support the human population purely on the basis of there
being too many mouths to feed and not enough growable crop yield.
And as we know from history - a lack of resources generally equals conflict - and then we haven’t
just got the weather to contend with, but full blown arctic warfare.
In the last mini ice-age, temperatures dropped so low that the River Thames in London froze
on at least seven different occasions.
With its major river kaput - London’s commerce ground to a halt - and thousands of people
in the surrounding cities and countryside died.
Farm animals were wiped out completely - and the wind was so cold that it cracked tree
trunks.
Yeah - we can expect much more of that in this particular scenario.
Forget Pumpkin-spiced Frappuccino’s, Keeping Up With The Kardashians and KSI vs Logan Paul
- hell, even forget mowing your lawn or enjoying a leisurely canoe ride across the harbour.
Even mowing your lawn would become a thing of the past.
There’d be two interests that everyone would be tuned into - keeping warm, and not starving.
Thankfully - we’ve got thousands of years of human ingenuity on our side, so maybe the
last 200 thousand years of human evolution have all been a warm up - before the big freeze.
Well, what do you guys think?
Could you survive another Ice Age?
What do you think would happen to the species as a whole?
Let us know your thoughts in the comment box down below.
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As always, you’ve been watching Life’s Biggest Questions - I’ve been your host
Jack Finch - and remember, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.