Randall Carlson

Well, here was the problem.

By the early 70s,

enough data had come in to show that, for example, the disappearance of the ice was a hell of a lot faster than anybody had imagined.

And it was a lot closer in our own time.

Rather than being 50 to 100,000 years, it was less than 10,000 years.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum, what happened, it was assumed that this ice mass over North America was relatively stable over 80 to 100,000 years.

And what radiocarbon revealed was that, wait a second, up near the shores near Hudson Bay, which would have been the center of the Great Ice Sheet, there were trees, there were forests growing 40,000 years ago.

So that did not square with the older, extended, longer, gradualistic models.

And at that point, there was a couple of conferences held in the early 1970s called, and they referred in the published papers about the proceedings of these conferences, they referred to the energy paradox.

Because what they realized was that, okay, it takes X amount of energy to melt a

y amount of ice so if you had a let's say the ice complex over north america was about six million cubic miles of ice it's a hell of a lot of ice now just as a visualization try to imagine you're standing there and you're looking at an ice cube and that ice cube is a mile high a mile wide and a mile deep

Now, what would happen if you melted that?

How long would it take to melt that if you just set it out?

Well, it's going to take a pretty good while to melt, particularly if it's in a northern climate.

Like where I grew up in Minnesota, yeah, we got four or five months in the year where things are going to melt, and then winter comes and the melting stops, right?

So we're up there.

We're in Canada, where now you have a long winter, a long cold winter, relatively short summer.

But the realization dawned on the researchers that –

If there were forests growing there 40,000 years ago, and the ice was gone basically by 8 to 10,000 years, we're now faced with this problem of we're going from an interglacial, probably not a whole lot different than now, to a full-blown glacial, and then that's gone, and that whole cycle is now taking place in, say, 25 or 30,000 years instead of 100,000 years.

What this did was led to the energy paradox.