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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.
Reconstruction of the past 5 million years of climate history, based on oxygen isotope fractionation in deep sea sediment cores (serving as a proxy for the total global mass of glacial ice sheets), fitted to a model of orbital forcing (Lisiecki and Raymo 2005) [2] and to the temperature scale derived from Vostok ice cores following Petit et al. (1999).
An interglacial period (or alternatively interglacial, interglaciation) is a geological interval of warmer global average temperature lasting thousands of years that separates consecutive glacial periods within an ice age. The current Holocene interglacial began at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,700 years ago.
Top chart: Earth's climate has cycled between ice ages and warm interglacial periods, with each cycle taking tens of thousands of years or more. Middle chart: Global average temperature was in a cooling trend for thousands of years before fossil fuel based industrialization. Since then, it has increased about a full 1°C—in a time period less ...
Off the charts “crazy” heat in the North Atlantic ocean and record-smashing Antarctic sea ice lows last year are far more severe than what Earth’s supposed to get with current warming levels.
Projected global surface temperature changes relative to 1850–1900, based on CMIP6 multi-model mean changes. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report defines global mean surface temperature (GMST) as the "estimated global average of near-surface air temperatures over land and sea ice, and sea surface temperature (SST) over ice-free ocean regions, with changes normally expressed as departures from a ...
Antarctica’s vast expanse of sea ice regulates Earth’s temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun’s heat back into the atmosphere. Record low sea-ice levels around Antarctica ...
2 levels at 750 parts per million (ppm; current levels are at 417 ppm [54]) have estimated the persistence of the current interglacial period for another 50,000 years. [55] However, more recent studies concluded that the amount of heat trapping gases emitted into Earth's oceans and atmosphere will prevent the next glacial (ice age), which ...