94 | Great Geologists
Temperature and greenhouse gas records from the Vostok ice core from Antarctica display
variations in keeping with Milankovitch cyclicity and correspond to phases of polar ice sheet
growth and decline.
into one volume Milanković began work on his “Canon of
Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the
Ice Ages”, which covered his nearly three decades of research,
and summarized the universal laws through which it was
possible to explain cyclical climate change and attendant ice
ages.
Milanković spent two years arranging and writing the “Canon”.
The manuscript was submitted to print on 2 April 1941 – four
days before the attack of Nazi Germany and its allies on the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In the bombing of Belgrade on 6 April
1941, the printing house where his work was being printed was
destroyed; fortunately a printed copy of the manuscript had
already been transferred to the printer’s warehouse. After the
successful occupation of Serbia on 15 May 1941, two German
officers with backgrounds in geology visited Milanković. He
gave them the only complete printed copy of the “Canon”
for safekeeping in the University of Freiburg. The book was
eventually published by the Royal Serbian Academy in German
as “Kanon der Erdbestrahlung und seine Anwendung auf das
Eiszeitenproblem”, a landmark in paleoclimate studies.
During the German occupation of Serbia from 1941 to
1944, Milanković withdrew from public life and decided to
write a personal history going beyond scientific matters.
This autobiography was published after the war, entitled
“Recollection, Experiences and Vision” in Belgrade in 1952.
Milanković had a long-standing interest in popularising
science. Between 1925 and 1928 Milanković wrote Through
Distant Worlds and Times in the form of a series of letters to
an anonymous woman. The work discusses the history of
astronomy, climatology and science via a series of imaginary
visits to various points in space and time by the author and his
unnamed companion, encompassing the formation of the Earth,
past civilizations, famous ancient and renaissance thinkers and
their achievements, and the work of his contemporaries. In the
“letters”, Milanković expanded on some of his own theories
on astronomy and climatology, and described the complicated
problems of celestial mechanics in a simplified manner.
After the Second World War he began publishing numerous
books on the history of science, including Isaac Newton and
Newton’s Principia (1946), The Founders of the Natural Sciences:
Pythagoras – Democritus – Aristotle – Archimedes (1947) and
Techniques in the Ancient Times (1955).
Milanković suffered a stroke and died in Belgrade in 1958.
He is buried in his family cemetery in Dalj. His work has left a
profound legacy for Earth sciences. Not only can it be used to
explain some of the key driving mechanisms of climate change
in the geological past, but Milankovitch cyclicity is increasingly
recognised through its visible expression in the rock record. For
example, the origin of rhythmically bedded successions, such as
the Early Jurassic open marine limestones and marls of southern