Europe plunged into ice age within months
Just like the rapid chills in The Day After Tomorrow, the last mini ice age to hit Europe developed fast.
Scientists have come up with the most precise record of climate and revealed the 'big freeze' 12,800 years ago came on very quickly.
Triggered by slowdown of the Gulf Stream, glaciers engulfed Europe and lasted for around 1,300 years.
Until now, it was thought the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold. But the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada, have other ideas.
After studying mud core from an ancient lake in Ireland, the boffins found that temperatures plummeted within months, or a year at most.
The rapid freeze was brought about when a glacial lake covering most of north-west Canada burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.
The huge flood diluted the salinity-driven North Atlantic Ocean mega-currents, including the Gulf Stream, and stalled it.
A similar thing happened again 8200 years ago, when the Northern hemisphere went through another cold spell.
But did you know we are actual living in an ice age now? It just happens to be a brief spell when the glaciers have retreated. However, they'll be back (human-caused climate change, not withstanding).
Weird Science Factoid: Attics were invented in Attica, Greece.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
