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Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe and North America stopped their creeping advance.
One possible explanation is that when the Northern Hemisphere began to warm around 13,000 years ago, meltwater and icebergs flooded the North Atlantic Ocean, causing a temporary cooling of the...
When less sunlight reaches the northern latitudes, temperatures drop and more water freezes into ice, starting an ice age. When more sunlight reaches the northern latitudes, temperatures rise, ice sheets melt, and the ice age ends. But there are many other factors.
The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago.
The end of the last glacial period, which was about 10,000 years ago, is often called the end of the ice age, although extensive year-round ice persists in Antarctica and Greenland. Over the past few million years, the glacial-interglacial cycles have been "paced" by periodic variations in the Earth's orbit via Milankovitch cycles .
New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth's axis was approaching higher values.
Unlike the relatively stable climate Earth has experienced over the last 10,000 years, Earth's climate system underwent a series of abrupt oscillations and reorganizations during the last ice age...
New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth's axis was approaching high values. During...
The two main candidates are the subtle increases in the tilt of the Earth’s axis (called obliquity) and the rotational changes that govern which part of the year that the Earth is closest to the Sun (precession).
The most recent ice age occurred between 120,000 and 11,500 years ago, while the current interglacial period – the Holocene – is expected to last for additional tens of thousands of years (and human activity may inadvertently delay the start of the next ice age even further).