The Woman Who Froze Time in a Fern

The Breaking Point

The Woman Who Froze Time in a Fern

Clean

Published on Jun 18, 2026, 7:38:13 AM
Total time: 00:30:54

Episode Description
In 1912, a Serbian mathematician named Milutin Milanković set out to calculate the temperature of every planet in the solar system using nothing but pencil, paper, and a theory that nearly everyone ignored for fifty years. Then a geologist cracked open an ice core in the 1970s and found his numbers buried in the ancient sediment — almost exactly right. This is the story of how one man's obsessive arithmetic predicted Earth's ice ages from a prison cell during World War One, and why the climate cycles he described may determine the fate of human civilization.
More about The Breaking Point
Every scientific breakthrough has a moment when everything changes forever. Join us as we dive deep into the exact moments when human understanding shattered and reformed, from the split second discoveries that rewrote textbooks to the quiet epiphanies that transformed civilization.