Can the subtle wobbles of Earth’s orbit explain the mystery of the ice ages?

Nature · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Milutin Milanković, a Serbian engineer turned astronomer, proposed that slow, predictable changes in Earth's orbit redistribute sunlight enough to trigger global ice ages. While his mathematical model of planetary climate remains a foundational pillar of Earth science, modern researchers continue to debate how these cycles interact with other atmospheric forces.

Born in 1879, Milutin Milanković began his career as a civil engineer, mastering reinforced concrete construction in Vienna. His professional life was defined by a rare duality: he was both a practical builder of bridges and viaducts across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a profound theorist of celestial mechanics. Even while imprisoned during World War I, he used his confinement to advance his calculations on the thermal conditions of the inner planets, including Mars, Venus, and the Moon.

Milanković’s most enduring contribution is the theory that variations in Earth's orbit—now known as Milankovitch cycles—alter the amount of solar radiation reaching the planet. By the 1920s, encouraged by climatologist Wladimir Köppen, he expanded his work to map these insolation changes over the past 650,000 years. He hypothesized that cool summers at high northern latitudes were the critical trigger for the growth of ice sheets during the Quaternary period, effectively attempting to transform descriptive climatology into an exact, predictive mathematical science.

Today, his legacy is complex. While his calculations regarding orbital mechanics and insolation are confirmed, his original theory of climate is considered inconsistent with modern data on greenhouse gas forcing, ocean circulation, and the dynamic behavior of ice sheets. Despite these discrepancies, Milanković’s work remains the essential starting point for understanding glacial-interglacial cycles. The challenge of fully reconciling his astronomical forcing model with the broader, messy reality of Earth's climate history remains one of the most significant open problems in the geosciences.

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