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A less severe cold period or ice age is shown during the Jurassic-Cretaceous (150 Ma). There have been five or six major ice ages in the history of Earth over the past 3 billion years. The Late Cenozoic Ice Age began 34 million years ago, its latest phase being the Quaternary glaciation, in progress since 2.58 million years ago.
A glacial period (alternatively glacial or glaciation) is an interval of time (thousands of years) within an ice age that is marked by colder temperatures and glacier advances. Interglacials, on the other hand, are periods of warmer climate between glacial periods. The Last Glacial Period ended about 15,000 years ago. [1]
The Pleistocene (/ ˈ p l aɪ s t ə ˌ s iː n,-s t oʊ-/ PLY-stə-seen, -stoh-; [4] [5] referred to colloquially as the Ice Age) is the geological epoch that lasted from c. 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations.
The geologic time scale or geological time scale (GTS) is a representation of time based on the rock record of Earth. It is a system of chronological dating that uses chronostratigraphy (the process of relating strata to time) and geochronology (a scientific branch of geology that aims to determine the age of rocks).
The dates for each age can vary by region. On the geologic time scale, the Holocene epoch starts at the end of the last glacial period of the current ice age (c. 10,000 BC) and continues to the present. The beginning of the Mesolithic is usually considered to correspond to the beginning of the Holocene epoch
This area was covered by an ice field during the last ice age, and preliminary data from Hall’s research suggest the ice had collapsed back to its center by around 18,000 years ago.
Prehistoric people occupied the site toward the end of the last ice age, and temperatures would have been 5 to 7 degrees Celsius colder than they are today, Pelton said.
500 million years of climate change Ice core data for the past 400,000 years, with the present at right. Note length of glacial cycles averages ~100,000 years. Blue curve is temperature, green curve is CO 2, and red curve is windblown glacial dust (loess). Scale: Millions of years before present, earlier dates approximate.