 Climatologist watches Ice Age 2, the Meltdown
Miraculous Melting in Ice Age 2
by Peter Vlam
The characters from the first one of this animation film series, Manny, Sid and Diego return in another incredible adventure. The Ice Age is coming to an end, and the animals are not aware of anything wrong. They are enjoying their new world: a melting paradise of warm pools, geysers and tar pits. But then, Manny, Sid and Diego discover that the giant masses of melting ice will flood their valley. They must warn everyone and somehow figure out a way to escape the coming deluge. Together they escape and find a solution for the rising water.
Scientist Dr Frank Peeters: 'What a lost opportunity, this film.'
'Of course, this is a children's film. A very artfully made animation film, OK. But surely, the makers could have tried their best just a little more to give a more realistic impression of what might have happened? Surely, they could have done a better job!'
 In his office at the university geologist Frank Peeters and I watch Ice Age 2 on his laptop computer. Maps of the oceans, graphs and tables lie scattered on his desk. Photos from expeditions that took Frank to faraway cold places decorate the office walls. Frank Peeters is a palaeo-ecologist, someone who studies past environments. He works at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and is especially interested in climate change. He investigates how, during the past 100 thousand years, ice ages had ended so rapidly. But now we are watching a children's film and ask ourselves how realistic it is.
 And even piranhas! See clip.
The story goes like this. The animals live happily together on their icy plain. But behind the big ice wall, hard to access, something is going on and it's not clear what. Behind the wall the water seems to be rising. It seems that the wall is about to break and nothing will stop the rising water. And, hasn't it been much warmer lately? The ice is melting at a superfast rate! This what the heroes of the film find out. They have to escape. If they don't they will drown in an enormous pool of water.
 The water level rises, the ice melts, they must find a safe spot. How to get rid of the vast sea that is threatening them? Frank Peeters looks at it with a critical eye. Ít's all wrong. It's completely unclear why it's getting warmer. It looks as if the water comes out of the Earth. We suddenly see geysers. But these only occur where the Earth's crust is thin, like in Iceland or Hawai'i. Hot water geysers have very little to do with the melting of polar ice. Remember, in Iceland you can find many geysers right next to glaciers. You also see an enormous ice cliff, maybe hundreds of metres high, if you compare it to the size of the animals. The ice cliff is in the middle of a forest. In the real world you don't have this kind of high ice cliffs. They usually are much lower and occur near the coast where glaciers calve into the sea.
 steaming ocean
In the film a village is threatened by water that comes from somewhere and miraculously disappears again at the end of the film. This happens when another ice wall breaks open. A huge flood is prevented when the water surges away through the hole and everybody is happy.
'This is totaly ridiculous, of course,' says Frank. 'This has nothing to do with how ice ages come to an end. Ice is melting due to a local heat source and nothing suggests a global climate change. It goes without saying that the end of an ice age is a global process.'
Frank Peeters thinks it's a shame that the film makers did not opt for a somewhat more realistic approach. If anything could have caused the warming in their territory it's the heat that's transported to the land from the ocean. And it's the ocean that turns on and off this heat transport from time to time.
Think of the warm Gulf Stream bringing warm and moist air to northern Europe. When the Gulf Stream stops, we have an ice age. When it switches on again, a warmer climate returns.
Peeters: 'Deglaciation, the ending of an ice age, has to do with heat transport from the tropics, the lower latitudes, to the polar regions, the higher latitudes. This is something the film makers do not show. But they could have done it, and it would not have made the film boring.'
 'Imagine the events happen somewhere North and an immense steaming ocean draws near. Suddenly palm trees and coconuts float past. Hey! The ocean brings warm water from the South! Then, you would have a much more plausible scenario.'
'Now the film lets the heat come from within the Earth, by geysers, and this forces the ice dam to burst. But again, this is not the true mechanism.'
'They could have made the story at the same time realistic and exciting (and maybe a little exaggerated): tropical animals suddenly show up at the ice cliff where formerly only mammoths and rodents were living. This would have been a step in the right direction. That's why I think this is a missed opportunity.'
global threat
On the other hand, Peeters likes it that the film shows the audience that something like climate change might happen. 'The film clearly shows the dangers of melting ice, rising sea level and changing environment for the animals. And that, of course, is exactly what is happening worldwide right now.'
Peeters continues about the climate change that's happening now: 'It's very alarming. The commotion about the present climate change is in fact based on a very simple observation. We see that the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has rapidly become higher over the last 100 years. This caused by the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). We know that this CO2 emission and its increase in the atmosphere adds to the warming of the atmosphere.'
'On Greenland and Antarctica you can drill into the icecaps and collect ice cores. These cores (sometimes a few thousand metres long rods of ice) are beautiful climate archives. The top part is the youngest while the bottom part may be hundreds of thousands of years old. We can measure CO2 in tiny air bubbles in the ice and this helps us reconstruct how the amount of this greenhouse gas has changed over time. In other words, we know what the atmosphere was like hundreds of thousands of years ago.'
'We see, for instance, that there was less CO2 in the atmosphere during ice ages than during the warm periods, the interglacials. During the last hundred years, humans managed to pump as much extra CO2 into the atmosphere as nature did in 100,000 years. During the last million years, nothing happened that compares with this. Today, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than has ever been measured. What makes it even more alarming is that this has never happened during all of the Earth's long history. Never have CO2 levels been so high, nor have they been rising as rapidly as they do now due to us humans. We are entering a new and unknown territory, so to speak.'
 Temperature change since the Middle Ages
'We have learned from the past (that's what palaeoclimatologists do), but these lessons are limited. After all, what's happening now has never happened before. So, wemust try to estimate what is going to happen, put these data into climate models and let the computer calculate predictions. Not a simple job because you need to take many factors into account! But that's not what this film is about.'
Ice Age 2, the Meltdown has a happy end. The rising water disappears after our hero forces an enormous crack in the ice wall. The water vanishes into this void. Good riddens! Alas, this simple solution is far removed from reality.
We very much enjoyed watching Ice Age 2. To a scientist it may not be a very realistic film but it was great fun. The animations are breathtaking, even better than in the first Ice Age film. And it does a good job making the audience aware of the dangers of climate change. Go and watch it if the film still shows in your neighbourhood. Or, else, get the dvd. Or, even, play the game.
 Watch the trailer here.
sources
Al Gore's website and film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC
Ice Age 2, the official site, clips, pictures, downloads, game
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