A quick phone call initiated a collaboration that fixed that gap. In Doug's case, one of the anonymous referees realized that there was a big gap in his theory: he hadn't worked out how the sloughing ice could pick up the rocks and dump them into the ocean. Any scientist anywhere in the world can submit a paper to the same journal calling attention to perceived inconsistencies, omissions or outright mistakes in the original paper. Once the paper is published, it is subjected to a wider form of peer review. They advise the journal editor whether the paper is reasonable and worth publishing. The person submitting the paper is not told who the referees are, but normally they are chosen not just from his or her general field but from the writer's specialty. The editors send the paper to one or more other scientists who evaluate it. With an idea in hand, the first step is to submit a paper to a journal that in turn will vet it by a process known as peer review. This is where the historic procedures of the scientific community come into play. It was the ice driving Earth's climate, rather than vice versa." In a profession full of people who want to understand Earth's climate, a notion like this can be regarded as anything from a brilliant flash of insight to the rankest heresy. "The point of the model," he told me recently, "was that everything depended on the internal behavior of the ice sheet. At the same time, the additional fresh water changed the patterns of ocean currents while the absence of two vertical miles of ice changed wind patterns (hence the change in climate). When the icebergs melted, the rocks were dumped (hence the strange layers). The depth of the sheet would increase as snow fell and compressed into ice, but when the ice lying on top of Hudson Bay reached to a height of about 10,000 feet, the soft rocks underneath would crumble and mix with meltwater, forming a slippery paste, and the whole thing would slough down Hudson Strait and eventually into the ocean, sending out an armada of icebergs, each with a load of crushed rocks frozen into its undersides. These sudden shifts in climate, accompanied by out-of-place rocks being dumped into the North Atlantic, were called "Heinrich events" after the German scientist who first discovered them.ĭoug's idea was that you could understand both the origin of the rocks in the ocean bottom cores and the dramatic shift in the weather in terms of the behavior of the ice sheet that covered North America over much of the past 80,000 years. Average temperatures climbed more than 10 degrees - the equivalent of moving the climate of Atlanta to Boston - in a few decades, followed a few thousand years later by an equally rapid return to normal. Other evidence suggested that these layers, which formed every 7,000 to 12,000 years, marked periods of rapid climate change. Geologists were amazed to discover successive layers of rock debris and gravel that seemed out of place: the rocks in those layers appear identical to stuff you'd expect to find on land in northern Canada. The problem he addressed had to do with a strange phenomenon people had found in cores drilled out of the ocean floor in the North Atlantic. Having spent months camping on Antarctic glaciers and years trying to model their flow with computers, he knows about how ice behaves when it piles up. To refresh your memory, Doug works in glaciology. Doug's idea has since gone through the scientific mill it's time to go back and see what happened. In the August 1993 Phenomena you met Douglas MacAyael of the University of Chicago, a young scientist who had just had a good idea about why Earth's climate developed as it did during the last ice age. So if you want to follow the story of a good idea, what better place to look than science?Īs it turns out, readers of this column already have an excellent example at hand. Over the centuries, the scientific community has developed a complex set of rules about how ideas are to be evaluated, as well as some pretty definite criteria that tell you when they can be accepted. The sciences are a branch of human endeavor in which ideas are the main item of commerce, the principle coin of the realm. Sometimes the ideas are total flops, in which case we bury them and move on. Sometimes the ideas work out, and many illustrious careers have been built on such flashes of insight. There are few things in life more exhilarating than getting a really good idea - one that just sings as it solves a problem that's been bothering you for God knows how long.
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