Climatologists believe they know why Earth has undergone a regular sequence of ice ages beginning around 800, 000 years ago. Calculations show that Earth' s orbit around the Sun has fluctuations that coincide with the ice-age cycles. The climatologists hypothesize that when the fluctuations occur, Earth passes through clouds of cosmic dust that enters the atmosphere; the cosmic dust thereby dims the Sun, resulting in an ice age. They concede, however, that though cosmic dust clouds are common, the clouds would have to be particularly dense in order to have this effect.
Large bits of cosmic rock periodically entering Earth's atmosphere, raising large amounts of dust from Earth's surface would lend support to the climatologists' hypothesis EXCEPT.