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Short Wave

What Space Dust Reveals About Earth's Ice Age

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.76K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Cosmic dust can tell scientists about how ice covered Earth during the last ice age. This dust is leftover debris from asteroids and comets colliding in space and this dust constantly rains down on our planet. Researcher Frankie Pavia from the University of Washington recently used a brand new method for estimating climate conditions 30,000 years ago, by looking at the cosmic dust amounts in ancient arctic ocean soil. He and a team found new clues to what melted arctic ice at the end of the ice age. These results may be able to better inform ice melt in the future.


Interested in more space science? Email us your question at [email protected].


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Transcript

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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

0:57.9

Around 20,000 years ago, the world was cold.

1:02.3

Temperatures around the world averaged 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than they are today.

1:05.1

And most of North America was covered in ice.

1:09.7

Humans were surviving, though, mastering fire and making friends with wolves.

1:16.6

There's places where the ice is a kilometer thick sitting on top of North America, the northern U.S. and Canada.

1:20.4

That's Frankie Pavia, a geochemist at the University of Washington.

1:26.9

He says because the Earth's climate was so different during that time, the winds and oceans move differently than they do now.

1:32.3

And the sort of background state of Earth's climate, right, is just different as a result, both of these changes to the Earth's surface and, right, because there's a hundred parts

1:37.3

per million less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during this time.

1:41.3

But in the couple thousand years to follow, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and

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