You can remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones.
(Plato)
Little Ice Age, yes, another one obviously, Fritz Loewe was auguring. It was evident now. The data were unambiguous: the Baffin–Barren–Grounds–Glacier was growing. The growth was slow, but it was growth nevertheless. It was an interesting phenomenon. – One knew that glaciations had occurred in Europe and North America at about the same time. Yet, had they really been parallel? Or could they have been separate events happening at the same time? The European ice had originated from the glaciers of Scandinavia and Novaya Zemlya, while the American ice had come from Greenland and the Cordilleras.
So, could Greenland alone start a glaciation, after the European glaciers had been removed by the Weizsäcker Sun? Or would BBGG cause the Cordilleras to ice up too? That had to be investigated. – Anyway, BBGG was due to influence weather in North America. It was going to become colder – by one or two degrees Celsius on average, but much colder on the Great Plains, that vast blizzard avenue. However, would there be more moisture? Then the glacier should continue growing. Or would the weather turn dry? – Fascinating questions… Loewe was grateful to be living right now. Scrutinising this phenomenon was going to become a windfall for climatology.
It was good that Greenland belonged to Denmark. Hence, one could observe everything from close quarter. The KWI Met had been allowed to set up a research base at Godthåb. Preparations were well under way. Danish colleagues were going to join the team. – The Greenland ice had stopped growing after it had created BBGG. So, had precipitation wandered westwards? – There would be no ice advance within the next hundred or two hundred years, this was clear. BBGG was still too small for that. It had to grow considerably to march the ice tongues off.
Loewe was determined to find out which mechanism was feeding BBGG. That was the crucial question. One knew that the ice had been there – during the last four glacial periods of the past. But one had no idea which process had fed the glaciers. Cold stage wasn’t ice age by default. During the last glacial period, it had taken several thousand years, until the ice had started marching. During that time, the ice shields had continually grown, one believed. And finally, they, by then up to three kilometres thick, had started pushing forward the ice tongues.
The current phenomenon was too small to go global. It could only influence the weather in North America – and even there, people on the West Coast and on the coast of the Caribbean might not even notice the difference – at least for many, many years.