![]() Director: Roland Emmerich Year Of Release: 2004 Plot: Scientist Jack Hall realises the world is headed into a new ice age (confusingly caused by global warming, which switches off the jet stream and plummets the world into the freezer). However, despite having plenty of evidence, its difficult to get the government bigwigs to listen. As the world starts chilling, theyre forced to act, but it too late and suddenly everything a superstorm strikes that covers everything in ice. Unfortunately for Jack, that includes New York city, where his son is trying to survive in the city library. |
Depending on which scientist you believe, weve either just finished one, were heading for a new one, or were in the middle of one. Thats right, were talking ice ages. Theyre buggers those ice ages, and chilly too. So generally you wouldnt want one to happen in your lifetime, which means its a bit of a bummer for the global population in The Day After Tomorrow.
However, like a lot of Roland Emmerichs disaster flicks, including the recent 2012, The Day After Tomorrow has a sheen on science hidden under massive glaciers worth of over the top (but rather entertaining) silliness. Unlike 2012, where they employed scientists who had to come up with a set of ridiculously improbable circumstances (and invent a new form of solar radiation) so they could find an excuse to pretty much blow up and then flood the entire world, with The Day After Tomorrow there are some scientists who think its ice age scenario is more plausible than it might seem.
If youre worried that an ice age is going to happen next week, I wouldnt start bulk buying thermal underwear just yet. It might only take a few days in The Day After Tomorrow, but scientists agree that in reality a new ice age would take decades, if not centuries to affirm its grip. But thats not to say it wont happen. There are many out there who believe that while global warming may initially cause problems by heating up the world, it could eventually trigger it to cool down dramatically.
But what would this exactly mean? Well, helpfully there have been many ice ages over the aeons, so we can just look back to them. For a start everything gets covered in ice. At times during the last ice age, up to a third of the worlds land surface was covered. Oddly, because this means that so much water is locked up in crystal form, the sea level drops substantially and the parts of the world that arent so cold have massive droughts, due to a lack of free water. Wherever you are on the planet, surviving is exceptionally difficult, although not impossible, as our Homo Sapien cousins so adroitly proved during the last one.
And it doesnt actually take a massive temperature drop to cause an ice age. Although scientists argue over quite how cold it really was during the last ice age, it is known that from about 1400AD, a drop in the average worldwide temperature of between one and two degrees Celsius set off what is known as the little ice age, which lasted for several hundred years and caused bitter winters. Its believed that because of this temperature drop, millions of people died, the population of Iceland halved and glaciers grew larger than they had been for thousands of years. Many believe a drop of another couple of degrees would have seen us locked up in another ice age, but luckily between 1850 and 1900 the world warmed up again, and has continued warming ever since at an accelerating rate.
And if youre one of those people that thinks all this global warming stuff is bull anyway, just bear in mind that the last ice age only ended around 10,000 years ago. That might sound like a long time ago, but it started over a million years ago. During this time there were many lulls where the ice melted. These warm periods often lasted thousands of years. In fact, some scientists arent convinced that the last ice age is really over and were just in one of those lulls now.
The theory in The Day After Tomorrow is that as global warming causes temperatures to rise, this will start affecting ocean currents. Its the movement of warm water from the tropics towards the poles that helps ensure the ice caps dont extend a hell of a lot further than they do (in the last ice age, walls of ice over a mile thick stretched all the way to southern England). However, as temperatures rise, some think this could switch the major currents off, or cause them to change direction. The cause of this would be changes in salinity and water temperature. The idea is that as the ice caps melt, it would dump huge amounts of fresh water into the northern and southern seas, making them less salty and screwing with the fluid dynamics that cause the currents to run. As a result, some scientists believe the current could change, causing the sea and air temperature in both the north and south of the planet to drop and the ice sheets to start expanding.
The importance of these currents can be seen in the fact that the Gulf Stream, which takes warm water and air from the Gulf Of Mexico across the Atlantic towards Northern Europe, keeps the average temperature of the UK several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be (London is around the same latitude as Moscow, but a lot hotter)), and even keeps the west coast of Britain and Ireland a couple of degrees warmer than the east coast.
However most scientists think the idea o the ocean currents either shifting or shutting off, as they do in The Day After Tomorrow, is extremely remote even with global warming, and theres not even a consensus as to whether this would be enough to set off a full-on ice age anyway.
There are also some other semi-scientific things in The Day After Tomorrow, such as the super-cells, which are almost like tornadoes of super-chilled air that are so cold that they can freeze things where they stands. The idea originated with a Russian scientist called Immanuel Velikovsky for. This interesting, if slightly nutty, man was at the forefront of a movement known as catastrophism. He wrote a book called Earth in Upheaval in 1956, which argued that a huge catastrophe had happened in the last ice age, which had caused the extinction of the mammoth. He suggested that this had been almost instantaneous and cataclysmic event, which had seen temperatures drop in a matter of days, with areas that were so cold that animals were flash frozen. It was much like the events that unfold in The Day After Tomorrow, however as he wrote another book arguing that Venus only came into existence when it was ejected out of Jupiter around 1450BC, perhaps we shouldnt believe him too much.
Much of his evidence came from mammoth that had been found in the tundra, which had frozen quickly enough that it was possible to see what their last meal was. The idea was that for the plants theyd eaten not to have rotted or been digested, the animals would have had to be frozen incredibly quickly, almost at the moment of eating them. However later evidence suggests this doesnt necessarily have to be true, and if the animal died shortly after eating and froze more slowly soon after, this would explain why their meal was still is their stomach thousands of years later.
Either way, while a new ice age isnt beyond the limits of possibility, its pretty remote so I dont think we need to panic, despite what The Day After Tomorrow says.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Dawson’s Creek – Seasons 1-6 – Or, why grown men should like Dawson’s Creek
NEXT: Day Of The Dead (1985) – Or, why you’re free to making your own living dead film
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter