Melting Ice - Rising Seas: Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment

The lecture explains how greenhouse gases and temperatures varied through time, giving us alternating periods of warm 'greenhouse' climate and cold 'icehouse' climate over the past 500 million years. It explains how it is that Antarctica was once covered by subtropical forests, and why ice sheets did not cover it until 34 million years ago. It also explains the origins of the global Ice Age of the past 2.6 million years, explores the roles of the Sun, the Earth's orbit, volcanoes and greenhouse gases in controlling past climate change, and provides a past natural analog for today's unnatural global warming.