Geological and solar climates : Their causes and variations by Marsden Manson
Encovragements, for such as shall have intention to bee vnder-takers in the new…. is a scientific thesis written in the late 19th century. It argues about geological and solar climates, presenting a physical explanation for the Ice Age and long-term climate shifts. The likely topic is how Earth’s internal heat, the atmosphere, and especially the properties of water shaped ancient climates before solar control created today’s latitudinal climate zones. The book contends
that early Earth’s climate was governed by internal heat, which, through vast cloud cover, blocked both outgoing and incoming radiation and produced globally uniform climates that shifted from torrid to tropical to temperate. As internal heat waned, the high specific heat of the oceans prolonged warmth and moisture, and when the 32°F isotherm reached land, snow began to persist, initiating a latitude-independent glaciation of continental areas—the Ice Age—while warm seas and dense fogs sustained it. Once oceanic heat was exhausted and clouds thinned, solar energy took control, climates aligned with latitude, and continental ice retreated along modern isotherms. Drawing on fossil distributions (tropical life at high latitudes), widespread glacial traces on multiple continents, and “unglaciated” regions shielded by massive lava outflows, the author rejects small orbital or solar variations as primary causes, critiques mathematical objections that ignore atmospheric shielding, and describes a continuing, modest postglacial warming via atmospheric “heat trapping.” He extends the framework to other planets (e.g., cloud-shrouded Jupiter, long-cooled Mars) and concludes that the Ice Age marks the shift from earth-heat to solar-heat climate control. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Manson, Marsden, 1850-1931 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 09019309 |
| Title | Geological and solar climates : Their causes and variations |
| Original Publication | Printer: San Francisco: University of California, 1893. |
| Credits | Jamie Brydone-Jack, BlueDiamondHead, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | QC: Science: Physics |
| Subject | Glacial epoch |
| Subject | Climatology |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77456 |
| Release Date | Dec 13, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 189 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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