Abstract
Oxygen isotope dilution histories of the oceans, which have been inferred through mass spectrometric analysis of foraminiferal tests from deep sea sedimentary cores, demonstrate that throughout the Pleistocene period the volume of continental ice has been a highly oscillatory function of time. The 105 year cycle which dominates this variability has proven rather difficult to reconcile with the conventional astronomical theory of ice ages which is otherwise strongly supported by the data. This paper describes a new nonlinear model of ice age climate which incorporates an explicit description of ice sheet accumulation and flow and of the physics of the isostatic sinking of the earth under the weight of the ice. The model is shown to explain the dominant 105 year cycle as a subharmonic resonant relaxation oscillation which characterizes its response to realistic astronomical forcing.
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