The Factology Daily

What people get wrong about Milankovitch cycles.

Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years.

Oct 12, 2026
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Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years.

Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The phenomenon is named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. In the 1920s, he provided a more definitive and quantitative analysis than James Croll's earlier hypothesis that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
  2. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q211446
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