Milutin Milankovitch

Milutin Milankovitch was a Serbian geophysicist and astronomer who developed a mathematical theory linking long-term changes in the Earth's climate to periodic variations in the Earth's orbit and orientation relative to the Sun. Working largely in the 1920s and 1930s, Milankovitch calculated how three separate cyclical changes, the shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, called eccentricity, the tilt of the Earth's axis, called obliquity, and the wobble of that axis over time, called precession, combine to alter the amount and distribution of solar radiation the Earth receives at different latitudes and seasons over tens of thousands of years. He proposed that these combined cycles, now called Milankovitch cycles, could explain the timing of ice ages by altering how much summer sunlight reaches high northern latitudes, affecting whether winter snow cover survives through the following summer. Milankovitch's theory was largely set aside for decades after its publication but gained strong support beginning in the 1970s, when researchers found that cycles matching his predicted periods were indeed recorded in deep-sea sediment cores, and the theory is now a central part of the accepted explanation for the timing of past glacial cycles.