This World War I Prisoner of War Solved the Mystery of the Ice Ages

Milutin Milankovi , a Serbian scientist, was captured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 .

He was taken prisoner before he and his new wife could make it back to their home and work in Belgrade , Serbia .

Today , his name remains on scientists’ lips as so-called Milankovic cycles are widely accepted as the cause of the periodic ice ages.

In the 1860s and ’70s , a janitor named James Croll thought that Earth 's distance from the sun might influence the relative coldness or warmth of winter and summer .

Croll ’s ideas failed to gain mainstream traction, in part because they were wrong in their specifics.

A key insight was combining this idea of the importance of mild seasons with three different variables in Earth 's orbit.

The cycles vary on a time scale of about 23,000 years and interact to change the total amount of incoming sunlight.

Milankovi's theory won the contest of potential ice age causes.

His work inspired a whole new field of science called cyclostratigraphy.

The future of the ice age cycles that Milankovic sought to understand might be uncertain in a warming world, but his legacy is secure, at least among scientists.