Although we are presently done with Edwin Hubble, William Herschel and his sister Caroline, the story of astronomy is far from complete yet. Every scientist’s/astronomer’s life is a separate, individual epoch; iconic and inventive — full of new, hitherto uncharted and freshly discovered pack of knowledge piled up on previously-held beliefs and part scientific, part social dogmas. So are the lives and works of the men and women discussed herein before. Let us examine what comes next.

Ice Ages: This issue has blighted humankind for a very long time. Only very recently have humans come to understand it. In the process of this we have had to discard some hitherto-held beliefs and not-wholly established so-called half-truths.

In simple terms, Ice Ages were periods when much of planet Earth was covered by ice. The ice, or solid snow, covered the area from the North and South of the polar regions to as near the Equator as it was possible for ice to cover (you can say, up to some 35 degrees latitude in either case). Ice Ages have often prevailed in the long history (4.6 billion years) of the planet. In fact, there have been some 30 Ice Age periods in all — the last one ending some 10,000 to 12,000 years back, which is pretty recent in terms of the geological time span. The end of the last Ice Age allowed humanity to proliferate and progress by leaps and bounds.

Now let’s turn to a unique feature of the last Ice Age. In my own research into the highly enigmatic phenomenon, I came across a strange aspect of the Ice Age. Let the result of my curiosity now belong to my young friends.

You must have noticed a large collection of boulders (large stones) embedded in soil in many natural history films often shown on National Geographic Channel, or similar films, the venue being largely the vast Central African region. Occasionally there are single large stones, often as big as your house. These single stones aroused my curiosity many decades back. I thought hard for years till one day I found the answer; the answer to why these isolated boulders came to be there.

I asked myself, ‘Where did these lonely boulders come from, while there were none for, often, hundreds of miles around?’

The answer came at a tremendous cost to my power of imagination, and perseverance. Here we go — at the peak of the great Ice Age, large parts of mountains were prised loose from the parent hills and carried forward in smaller (but large enough) pieces over the face of the Earth, rolling all the way, goaded by the ever pushing ice in large quantities, notwithstanding the Earth's natural contours. For long the Earth had been assailed by large swathes of solid ice in endless sheets stretching for hundreds of miles in all directions, because of the prevailing Ice Age, forever pushing these great stones ever ahead until these came to be deposited in isolated places, to remain there until the next Ice Age.

At the very onset this ice drove the broken pieces of stones up towards Equator, albeit gradually, but surely. There these stones, or boulders, remained even when ice receded to its present abode — the Poles — at the end of the then prevailing Ice Age. These boulders are today found at hundreds of places and often serve as vantage points for lions and other felines stalking their prey, much as they did for men when they started walking on two legs (bipedal) instead of on all fours many million years ago and began to look afar for food or security.

The next time you see them in pictures you will of course view them differently. The boulders are a living testimony to the last Ice Age.

The topic will continue to haunt us until such hidden features are revealed in true reality, and in total. The boulders exist not just in Africa but in all continents.

Science tends to offer at least one tangible, and intelligible reason for any such paradox. In the case of the last Ice Age, a lot remains to be understood wholly. For instance, a lot of stress is being placed on the orbit of the sun (as ostensible culprit), or perhaps the loitering of a nearby star in close proximity of the sun which disturbs the orbital patterns of the Earth, resulting in the often horrendous Ice Age. Occasionally it’s also because a hot planet, as our dear Mother Earth is likely to become as a result of our own shenanigans.

So much for the elusive Ice Age which is likely to assail us again soon after the oncoming Warm (read hot) Planet Age in possibly the next 500 years. We have dwelt on the issue before, so let's call it a day, but think about it.

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 31st, 2016