Milutin Milanković · 1879–1958
My great-grandfather’s work
Why I built this
Milutin Milanković was my great-grandfather. I built this site so people can see what he spent decades calculating: how small changes in Earth’s orbit shift the sunlight reaching the far north, and how that paced the ice ages.
He did the work by hand, with pen and paper, working out the sunlight at every latitude through the seasons. He published the full theory in 1941. It stayed disputed for decades. In 1976, seabed sediment showed the same rhythms he had calculated. He had died in 1958.
I work in design and software. This is how I wanted to explain his work: you stretch the orbit, lean the axis and wobble it yourself, and watch what happens to summer sunlight at 65°N.
Filip van HarreveldCreative developer · Great-grandson of Milutin Milanković
About the project
How it works
The tour introduces the three motions one at a time and then runs them together over 800,000 years. The lab lets you set them yourself, or jump to dates from the La2004 orbit solution. It calculates sunlight at 65°N and adds a rough estimate of ice and global temperature. The estimate is not a forecast.
The scene draws the orbit’s shape five times too stretched by default, because the real orbit looks like a circle at screen size. Every calculation uses the true values.
Corrections
Found a mistake?
If you spot an error, know a better source, or want to talk about the project, write to me through filipvanharreveld.com.