Milutin Milanković

Milutin Milankovitch ( Serbian Cyrillic Милутин Миланковић; born May 28, 1879 in Dalj, then Austria - Hungary, † December 12, 1958 in Belgrade ) was a Yugoslavian geophysicist and mathematician.

( Also written Milankovitch, Milankovich, or Milankovitch Milankovitch ) Milankovitch acquired in 1920 by calculating the Milankovitch cycles great popularity in paleoclimatology. After him the asteroid ( 1605), Milankovitch and a lunar crater have been named. He founded also the new calendar of the Orthodox Church.

Life

Milankovitch studied civil engineering until 1902 at the Technical University in Vienna. In 1904 he received his doctorate in technical sciences. Later Milankovitch worked in the concrete construction company by Adolph Freiherr von Pittel, today Pittel Brausewetter, in Vienna, which dams, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts and other concrete structures throughout Austria - Hungary built. In 1909 him the Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Belgrade was offered. This year marks a turning point in his life. Although he continued grappled with technical and engineering concrete problems, he turned increasingly to astronomical- mathematical basic research.

In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, Milankovitch was interned because of his Serbian nationality - first in Neusiedl am See, later in Budapest. There he was allowed to work in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where the first manuscript on the impact of astronomical cycles originated on the Earth's climate. The "Mathematical theory of thermal phenomena caused by solar radiation," he first published in French in 1920.

By absorbing solar radiation Milankovićs curve in the work " The climates of the geological antiquity " (1924), the internationally renowned meteorologists Wladimir Köppen and Alfred Wegener was Milankovićs theory known worldwide. After the initial recognition, he was invited to participate in two basic textbooks - the "Handbook of Climatology " (1930 ), and the "Handbook of Geophysics " ( 1933). The advent of " Mathematical Klimalehre and astronomical theory of climate fluctuations " (1930 ) was translated into Russian in 1939. The summary of his research published Milankovitch 1941 in German language under the title " canon of Erdbestrahlung and its application to the ice age problem." The factory was founded in 1969 and again in 1998 translated into English.

Milankovitch radiation curves

Milankovitch tried with his theory of a connection between the radiation budget of the Earth and the occurred in the past ice ages to produce. The radiation budget is influenced among other things by slight changes in the precession of the rotation axis, the tilt of Earth's axis ( obliquity of the ecliptic ) and the eccentricity of Earth's orbit. The possible influence of these three orbital cycles and their periodic occurrence are still referred to as Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch self-developed for the first time ( after many measurements in the 1920s and 1930s ) is a formula that for any latitude, these Milankovitch radiation curves could be calculated. The variations in seasonal insolation are different for each degree of latitude. The same is true with the maxima and minima of the radiation curves on the northern and southern hemispheres.

1924 tried the first time Köppen and Wegener, a parallelization of the radiation curves with the concepts defined by Penck outline of the ice ages in southern Germany make and believed to have a good match is found. However, subsequent tests with exact calculated radiation curves could not confirm this correlation.

The team fielded by Milankovitch theory that differences in the radiation balance of the Earth, caused by the changing orbital parameters mentioned above, can be used as the sole justification for the ice ages have been found to be not correct. It is assumed that be outgassed by the initial, the changing orbital parameters attributed to warming greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which is responsible for the further heating. Undeniably, at least, that the differences in the radiation balance of the Earth had a decisive influence on the climate of the past and it will have in the future. In this context, his ideas also play a role in relation to the greenhouse effect and global warming.

Writings

• Théorie mathématique of phénomènes thermiques produits par la radiation solaire, XVI, 338 S. - Paris: Gauthier -Villars, 1920
• Mathematical Klimalehre and astronomical theory of climate fluctuations. In: Köppen, W.; Geiger R. (eds. ): Handbook of Climatology, Vol 1: General Klimalehre, Berlin: Borntraeger, 1930
• Mathematical Klimalehre. In: Gutenberg, B. ( ed.) Handbook of Geophysics, Berlin: Borntraeger, 1933
• Canon of Erdbestrahlung and its application to the ice age problem. Académie royale serb. Éditions speciales; 132 [ vielm. 133 ]: XX, 633, Belgrade, 1941
• Canon of insolation and the ice -age a problem. English translation by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations, published for the U.S. Department of Commerce and National Science Foundation, Washington, DC: 633 pp., 1969
• Canon of Insolation and the Ice- Age Problem. Pantic, N. ( ed.), Beograd: Zavod Nastavna Sredstva, 634 pp., 1998