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News tagged with ice age

Genetic safety in numbers, platypus study finds

(Phys.org) -- Platypuses on the Australian mainland and in Tasmania are fighting fit but those on small islands are at high risk of being wiped out from disease, according to a University of Sydney study.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created May 18, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0

Ancient tree-ring records from southwest U.S. suggest today's megafires are truly unusual

Today’s mega forest fires of the southwestern U.S. are truly unusual and exceptional in the long-term record, suggests a new study that examined hundreds of years of ancient tree ring and fire data from ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created May 16, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (8) | comments 2

Illuminating carbon's climate effects: Researchers demonstrate role of CO2 in deglaciatio

Harvard scientists are helping to paint the fullest picture yet of how a handful of factors, particularly a worldwide increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, combined to end the last ice age 10,000-20,000 ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Apr 23, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (6) | comments 16

Carbon dioxide caused global warming at Ice Age's end, pioneering simulation shows

(PhysOrg.com) -- Climate science has an equivalent to the "what came first—the chicken or the egg?" question: What came first, greenhouse gases or global warming? A multi-institutional team led by researchers ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Apr 05, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (10) | comments 6

Evolution in action: Genetic study may answer why we have plenty of fish in the sea

(PhysOrg.com) -- Three-spine sticklebacks aren't as pretty as many aquarium fish, and anglers don't fantasize about hooking one. But biologists treasure these small fish for what they are revealing about the ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Apr 04, 2012 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (2) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

Nasa sees fields of green spring up in Saudi Arabia

(PhysOrg.com) -- Saudi Arabia is drilling for a resource possibly more precious than oil.

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 30, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (5) | comments 5

CO2 was hidden in the ocean during the Ice Age: study

Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth's climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 29, 2012 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (10) | comments 50 | with audio podcast

Scientists use rare mineral to correlate past climate events in Europe, Antarctica

The first day of spring brought record high temperatures across the northern part of the United States, while much of the Southwest was digging out from a record-breaking spring snowstorm. The weather, it seems, has gone ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 21, 2012 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (4) | comments 0

Research reveals first evidence of hunting by prehistoric Ohioans

Cut marks found on Ice Age bones indicate that humans in Ohio hunted or scavenged animal meat earlier than previously known. Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author ...

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

created Mar 01, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Research shows Scandinavian conifers survived Ice Age

Until now, it was presumed that the last glacial period denuded the Scandinavian landscape of trees until a gradual return of milder weather began and melted away the ice cover some 9000 years ago. That perspective ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Mar 01, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (5) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Ice Age coyotes were supersized, fossil study reveals

Coyotes today are pint-sized compared to their Ice Age counterparts, finds a new fossil study. Between 11,500 and 10,000 years ago — a mere blink of an eye in geologic terms — coyotes shrunk to their ...

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

created Feb 27, 2012 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (8) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Russians revive Ice Age flower from frozen burrow

It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Feb 20, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (39) | comments 31

Archaeologists discover Jordan's earliest buildings

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some of the earliest evidence of prehistoric architecture has been discovered in the Jordanian desert, providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago.

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

created Feb 20, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (10) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

New Zealand team finds early plant arrivers dominated landscape

(PhysOrg.com) -- It seems intuitive that not all plant species could have taken a foothold on land at the same time all those millions of years ago as conditions on Earth evolved to the point where they could survive; some ...

Biology / Ecology

created Feb 09, 2012 | popularity not rated yet | comments 0 | with audio podcast report

Sediments from the Enol lake reveal more than 13,500 years of environmental history

A team of Spanish researchers have used different geological samples, extracted from the Enol lake in Asturias, to show that the Holocene, a period that started 11,600 years ago, did not have a climate as ...

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

created Feb 03, 2012 | popularity 4.1 / 5 (7) | comments 1

Ice age

The general term "ice age" or, more precisely, "glacial age" denotes a geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in an expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of extra cold climate are termed "glaciations". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres; by this definition we are still in an ice age (because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist).

More colloquially, when speaking of the last few thousand years, "the" ice age refers to the most recent colder period (or freezing period) with extensive ice sheets over the North American and Eurasian continents: in this sense, the most recent ice age peaked, in its Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago. This article will use the term ice age in the former, glaciological, sense: glacials for colder periods during ice ages and interglacials for the warmer periods.

For more information about Ice age, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.