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Periodically, global temperatures drop, ice sheets form at the poles, then the ice creeps down to cover the continents. We call these ice ages. There have been five major ice ages in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. The last one began about 2.5 to 3 million years ago. And get this: it’s still going on.
The actual causation of an ice age is the fundamental feedback in the climate system, Maslin said. Scientists are still teasing apart how various environmental factors influence...
The origins of ice age theory began hundreds of years ago, when Europeans noted that glaciers in the Alps had shrunk, but its popularization is credited to 19th century Swiss geologist Louis...
Now, an international collaboration led by scientists from Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) have found evidence indicating that during ice ages, changes in the surface waters of the Antarctic Ocean worked to store more CO2 in the deep ocean.
Ice age, any geologic period during which thick ice sheets cover vast areas of land. Such periods of large-scale glaciation may last several million years and drastically reshape surface features of entire continents. A number of major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth history.
Between 36 and 20 million years ago the Earth experienced the first of three major cooling steps. At this time a continental-scale temperate ice sheet emerged in East Antarctica....
Starting about 2.6 million years ago, Earth experienced a number of ice ages. Those cool spells — possibly 40 or more of them — didn’t cause the entire planet to freeze, as likely happened in Snowball Earth eras.
Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance. Within a few hundred years sea levels in some places had risen...
The current ice age, known as the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation, started about 2.58 million years ago during the late Pliocene when the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began.
Ice ages lead to the development of continental ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres, and the growth of glaciers in mountainous parts of the world, such as the Himalayas,...