Pollen can help scientists track changes in vegetation through time, as they respond to moderations of the climate, be that glaciation or deglaciation with transitions into and out of ice ages. Furthermore, it can help elucidate ...
During the last ice age, massive icebergs periodically broke off from an ice sheet covering a large swath of North America and discharged rapidly melting ice into the North Atlantic Ocean around Greenland, triggering abrupt ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 24, 2023
0
111
By observing the night sky, medieval monks unwittingly recorded some of history's largest volcanic eruptions. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE), drew on readings of 12th and 13th ...
Planetary Sciences
Apr 5, 2023
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326
An international group of geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Francis Crick Institute, have found that the ancestry of dogs can be traced to at least two populations of ancient wolves. The work moves us a step closer ...
Evolution
Jun 29, 2022
0
459
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
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2607
A new study combining climate data with fossil records of large mammals that lived across Africa during the last 4 million years casts doubt on a long-standing hypothesis that repeated shifts in climate acted as major drivers ...
Evolution
Apr 11, 2022
1
72
One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century? The consensus view has long been that ...
Archaeology
Mar 23, 2022
2
1271
New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides a novel answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: what caused the Little Ice Age? ...
Earth Sciences
Dec 15, 2021
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2052
Ten thousand years ago, just after the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers buried an infant girl in an Italian cave. They entombed her with a rich selection of their treasured beads and pendants, and an eagle-owl talon, ...
Archaeology
Dec 14, 2021
4
10691
A University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 10, 2021
51
1087
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.
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