On a ho-hum day some 12,800 years ago, the Earth had emerged from another ice age. Things were warming up, and the glaciers had retreated.
Earth Sciences
Feb 1, 2018
69
8909
At least twice in Earth's history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic "Snowball Earth" events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 28, 2020
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2881
The northern Pacific near Japan and Russia is home for several different groups of orcas. They have no contact with each other, do not seek the same food, do not speak the same dialect, and do not mate with each other. How ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 21, 2023
0
1142
A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions in Norway and one in the U.K., has unveiled their findings after collecting and studying a very large number of ancient arrows they found near a melting ice patch ...
A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000 years ago come from, ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 24, 2022
45
2607
41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occured. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 16, 2012
11
40
This month there's been a hoopla about a mini ice age, and unfortunately it tells us more about failures of science communication than the climate. Such failures can maintain the illusion of doubt and uncertainty, even when ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 24, 2015
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5287
A ground-breaking new study on DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans - a man who lived 36,000 years ago in Kostenki, western Russia - has shown that the earliest European humans' genetic ancestry ...
Archaeology
Nov 6, 2014
89
59
Ancient DNA research has revealed that Ice Age cave artists recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago.
Archaeology
Oct 18, 2016
1
5958
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 managed to resurrect ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 20, 2012
31
0
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.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
