From the oceans’ depths to the polar ice caps, clues to the Earth’s past climates are engraved on our planet. Sea sediments reveal how much ice existed in the world and hint at past temperatures and weather patterns. Ice cores also provide a glimpse of past temperatures and preserve tiny bubbles of ancient atmosphere. Coral, tree rings, and cave rocks record cycles of drought and rainfall. Each piece of this complex puzzle must be put together to give us a picture of Earth’s climate history. Scientists’ efforts to explain the paleoclimate evidence—not just the when and where of climate change, but the how and why— have produced some of the most significant theories of how the Earth’s climate system works.

The Earth’s Shifting Orbit From the scratched rocks strewn haphazardly across the landscape and the thin layer of soil left behind by retreating glaciers, scientists learned that the Earth had gone through at least three or four ice ages. Noticing that the ice came and went cyclically, they began to suspect that the ice ages were connected to variations in the Earth’s orbit. The Earth circles the Sun in a flat plane. It is as if the spinning Earth is also rolling around the edge of a giant, flat plate, with the Sun in the center. The shape of the Earth’s orbit—the plate—changes from a nearly perfect circle to an oval shape on a 100,000-year cycle (eccentricity). Also, if you drew a line from the plate up through the Earth’s North and South Poles—Earth’s axis—the line would not rise straight up from the plate. Instead the axis is tilted, and the angle of the tilt varies between 22 and 24 degrees every 41,000 years (obliquity). Finally, the Earth wobbles on its axis as it spins. Like the handle of a toy top that wobbles toward you and away from you as the toy winds down, the “handle” of the Earth, the axis, wobbles toward and away from the Sun over the span of 19,000 to 23,000 years (precession). These small variations in Earth-Sun geometry change how much sunlight each hemisphere receives during the Earth’s year-long trek around the Sun, where in the orbit (the time of year) the seasons occur, and how extreme the seasonal changes are.