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Topic: Last ice age


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In the News (Fri 1 Jan 10)

  
  The Last Ice-Age
There have been several ice ages in the history of the Earth.
What is commonly called the ice age is actually the most recent (Quaternary) which began about two million years ago, and was characterized by cold (glacial), and relatively warm (interglacial) phases.
At the peak of the last glaciation, approximately 97% of Canada was covered by ice.
www.nature.ca /notebooks/english/iceage.htm   (134 words)

  
 Ice age
An ice age is a period of long-term downturn in the temperature of Earth's climate, resulting in an expansion of the polar ice caps and mountain glaciers ("glaciation").
Glaciologically, ice age is often used to mean a period of ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres; by this definition we are still in an ice age.
The present ice ages are the most studied and best understood, particularly the last 400 kyr, since this is the period covered by ice cores that record atmospheric composition and proxies for temperature and ice volume.
www.teachersparadise.com /ency/en/wikipedia/i/ic/ice_age_1.html   (1037 words)

  
 The Ice Age Cometh   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
Just as last week's tremors were destroying highways, buildings and lives in Southern California, an even deadlier natural disaster was advancing slowly but inexorably south from Canada into the U.S. By midweek a huge mass of frigid arctic air had practically paralyzed much of the Midwest and East.
The ice ages, he argued, were triggered by changes in the shape of the earth's slightly oval orbit around the sun and in the planet's axis of rotation.
The periodic "spikes" of warmer weather that have interrupted ice ages and the cold weather that often came on suddenly in the last interglacial period are also impossible to explain with astronomy.
www.junkscience.com /mar06/ice_age_cometh.htm   (1364 words)

  
 Ice age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the Cryogenian ice age, most of the Earth's land masses had coalesced into the supercontinent Rodinia, which was mostly within the Tropics.
The ice sheets increase the Earth's reflectivity and thus reduce the absorption of solar radiation.
The ice age contunes until the reduction in weathering causes an increase in the greenhouse effect.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Ice_age   (3221 words)

  
 Ice Ages
From palaeoclimatic records scientists now know that during the last 2 million years the Earth's climate has fluctuated between periods of relative warmth and relative cold, with global average surface temperature changing by as much a 5°C between the two climatic regimes.
Such analysis revealed that during the last Ice Age, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were significantly lower than they were before mankind began polluting the atmosphere 200 years ago.
Since carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas, it was believed that initial climatic changes resulting from orbital variations were somehow affecting the composition of the atmosphere, to the extent that a lowering of carbon dioxide concentrations was increasing the global cooling.
www.ace.mmu.ac.uk /eae/Climate_Change/Older/Ice_Ages.html   (468 words)

  
 Ice Age Trail: Glossary   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
Though common during the last Ice Age, the only ice sheet that today approaches the enormity of those existing during the Ice Age is on Antarctica.
Continental glaciation had far-reaching effects during the Ice Age, from sculpting a quarter of the Earth's landmass to dramatically changing the Earth's climate, oceans, plants and animals.
Visible along the Ice Age Trail from the Harrison Hills of Lincoln County, the Antigo Flats of Langlade County is a large outwash plain.
www.iceagetrail.org /infocenter/glossary.html   (992 words)

  
 Ice Age - Crystalinks
Glaciologically - Ice age is often used to mean a period of 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).
It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Cambrian Explosion, though this theory is recent and controversial.A minor ice age occurred from 460 to 430 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician Period.
The general consensus is that it is a combination of up to three different factors: atmospheric composition (particularly the fraction of CO2 and methane), changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun known as Milankovitch cycles (and possibly the Sun's orbit around the galaxy), and the arrangement of the continents.
www.crystalinks.com /iceage.html   (1744 words)

  
 … Ice Age Theories
He also estimated that the time since the last ice age to be 80,000 years ago, much older than the true value; we now know it ended between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago.
He took on the riddle of the ice ages as a challenge.
In fact, it was the observations of the regularity of the ice age cycles that led to the revival of the insolation theory.
muller.lbl.gov /pages/IceAgeBook/IceAgeTheories.html   (3044 words)

  
 Ireland in the last Ice Age
The Ice Age left the surface relief much as it now is, except that coastlines have been significantly altered by a subsequent rise of the sea-level caused by the melting of the ice [1].
The last cold spell began around 30,000 years ago and, in Ireland's neighbourhood, caused the Arctic ice to descend from the North Pole towards Europe.
Although all the ice was gone by 10,000 years ago, the sea levels continued to rise reaching a level 2 metres (7 feet) below their current level by 3000 years ago [3].
www.fortunecity.com /bally/sligo/93/past/pre_norman_history/iceage.html   (945 words)

  
 Biology News: Ice core reveals gentle start to last ice age
The last ice age began with gradual cooling rather than a dramatic climate crash, according to initial studies of the oldest Greenland ice core ever extracted.
Scientists had speculated that the whole ice age might have been triggered by an abrupt temperature change, perhaps when a rapid warming period melted a substantial part of the Greenland ice sheet.
Although ice ages are driven by our planet's proximity to the Sun, greenhouse gases magnify the warming effect to produce interglacial periods, such as the one we are experiencing now.
www.bioedonline.org /news/news.cfm?art=1136   (971 words)

  
 [No title]
Large ice sheets began to grow in the northern latitudes when the snow that fell in winter failed to melt, and instead piled up from one year to the next until it reached thousands of metres in thickness.
Even in areas that were not directly affected by the ice sheets, aridity began to cause forests to die and to give way to dry grassland, which requires less water to survive.
The ice melted back partially, and there followed a long 'middling' phase in which the climate oscillated between warmer and colder conditions, often in sudden jumps.
www.esd.ornl.gov /projects/qen/nerc130k.html   (2439 words)

  
 The Ice Age Cometh
A new ice age is due now, but you wont hear it from the green groups, who like to play on Western guilt about consumerism to make us believe in global warming.
The last (ice age) ended 10,000 years ago; the next one— for there will be a next on—could start tens of thousands of years from now.
In the second case, the ice age fails and global warming is gloriously successful.
www.ourcivilisation.com /aginatur/iceage.htm   (2078 words)

  
 Ice Core Indicates West Antarctic Ice Has Thinned Less Than Believed
Part of the puzzle has been whether the ice streams were flowing, whether they carried interior ice to the ice shelf at the end of the last ice age, and whether they began where they do now or receded along with the ice shelf's grounding line.
Studying the ice core layer by layer, each representing one year's worth of snowfall compacted into a very thin band, researchers were able to extract an isotope record that provided a picture of temperature and snowfall patterns near Siple Dome.
An ice sheet with such a low profile and gradual decline would have had to have a very slippery bed to maintain its continuous flow, Waddington said, and it appears the ice flowed vigorously despite being relatively thin.
www.terradaily.com /news/iceage-05j.html   (878 words)

  
 Ice Age
The cause of the melt down of the Ice Age is still a matter of conjecture and discussion.
During the long build up phase of the Ice Age, plants and animals were able to adapt to their slowly changing environment.
Following the melt down of the Ice Age, there was plenty or room left on the continent, and plenty of game, to support the few humans who were living in North America.
www.resurrectisis.org /IceAge.htm   (969 words)

  
 Wisconsin glaciation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As a result of melting ice, the land has continued to rise yearly in Scandinavia, mostly in northern Sweden and Finland where the land is rising at a rate of as much as 8-9 mm per year, or 1 meters in 100 years.
This glaciation is made of three glacial maximums (commonly called ice ages) separated by interglacial periods (such as the one we are living in).
The Pinedale glaciation was the last of the major ice ages to appear in the Rocky Mountains in the United States.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Last_ice_age   (1304 words)

  
 Collapse Of Antarctic Ice Sheet Triggered End Of Last Ice Age
The melting of an Antarctic ice sheet roughly 14,000 years ago triggered a period of warming in Europe that marked the beginning of the end of the Earth's last ice age, says a new study.
"The paper describes the last gasp of the ice age," says Jerry Mitrovica, the J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics at the University of Toronto and co-author of the paper.
Last year, Mitrovica and co-author Professor Peter Clark of the Oregon State University made headlines with their theory that the sudden influx of freshwater that occurred 14,000 years ago came from the Antarctic.
www.spacedaily.com /news/iceage-03b.html   (700 words)

  
 Debunking the Ice Age
At the peak of the last ice age...
The Ice Age, which at its maximum some 20,000 years ago was about 5 degrees to 7 degrees C (around 10 degrees F) colder than our current global climate, disappeared in, what is to nature, a relatively rapid period of about five to ten thousand years.
Explanations of the Ice Age vary, the most popular one being a change in the amount of sunlight coming in between (a) winter and summer and (b) the poles and the equator.
www.johmann.net /essays/ice-age.html   (2237 words)

  
 Ice Age Links for Kids
During an ice age, the polar regions are cold, there are large differences in temperature from the equator to the pole, and large, continental-size glaciers can cover enormous regions of the earth.
During the last Ice Age, there were many large, interesting mammals, like the saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, mastodons, and mammoths.
An ice age is a period of time - usually millions or tens of millions of years - when vast glaciers, called ice sheets, cover much of the Earth’s land surface.
www.athropolis.com /links/iceage.htm   (658 words)

  
 The last Ice Age; a third of Earth's surface is sheathed in ice for much of this period-- and world geography undergoes ...
Unfortunately, towards the end of this period, when the ice sheets are retreating and the ocean levels rising again, volcanic action tends to increase as the weight of the ice sheets themselves seemed to have restrained them earlier.
The Ice Age is also known as the Pleistocene Epoch, which began around 2,000,000 BC and ended about 6000 BC.
There was maybe 250 million years between the end of the Gondwana Ice Age and the beginning of the Pleistocene, during which no large ice sheets existed on Earth, and the entire planet was considerably warmer and more humid than 2000 AD.
www.jrmooneyham.com /the-last-ice-age.html   (1196 words)

  
 Antarctic Ice Collapse Began End of Ice Age?   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
Summary The melting of an enormous Antarctic ice sheet 14,000 years ago triggered climatic changes in Europe and North America that ultimately led to the end of the last ice age, according to a new study.
The melting of an enormous Antarctic ice sheet 14,000 years ago triggered climatic changes in Europe and North America that ultimately led to the end of the last ice age, according to a new study.
"The last gasp of the ice age was punctuated by a series of dramatic events," said Jerry Mitrovica, a professor of geophysics at the University of Toronto in Canada and one of the study's co-authors.
news.nationalgeographic.com /news/2003/03/0317_030317_iceshelf.html   (601 words)

  
 AlterNet: The Ice Age Cometh
We knew from the fossil record that the Great Ice Age period began a few million years ago, and during those years there were times where for hundreds or thousands of years North America, Europe, and Siberia were covered with thick sheets of ice year-round.
Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years.
When the ice in the Arctic Ocean is frozen solid and locked up, and the glaciers on Greenland are relatively stable, this variation warms and cools the Earth in a very small way, but doesn't affect the operation of the Great Conveyor Belt that brings moderating warm water into the North Atlantic.
www.alternet.org /story/17711   (1989 words)

  
 New Research Documents Extremely High Atmospheric Carbon 14 During Last Ice Age
While scientists have known for some time that atmospheric carbon 14 levels were higher and more variable in the Ice Age atmosphere than today, "the magnitude of variation revealed by our stalagmite is surprising," Beck and the others write in Science.
One way the carbon cycle may have differed during the Ice Age is a slower rate of ocean organism deposition on the deep ocean floor.
A breakup of western Antarctic ice sheets, or an increase in freshwater icebergs floating into these regions, or changes in wind that contributes to ocean mixing influence ocean mixing rates and could trigger abrupt change in the carbon cycle to produce greater concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, Beck said.
www.spacedaily.com /news/iceage-01b.html   (1014 words)

  
 Columbia News ::: Ocean Circulation "Conveyor" That Distributes Global Heat Slowed During Last Ice Age
The first step of the process involved measuring the ratio of oxygen isotopes recorded by foraminifera across the straits during the peak of the last ice age.
While other research has shown that the formation deep water in the North Atlantic all but stopped during the last ice age, the question remained as to whether the entire conveyor stopped, or simply became shallower.
During the last ice age, the winds, driven by equator-to-pole temperature differences, would likely have been stronger, if anything.
www.columbia.edu /cu/news/99/12/iceage.html   (819 words)

  
 NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Sea Level Rise, After the Ice Melted and Today   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-24)
It stood 4-6 meters above the present during the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago, but was 120 m lower at the peak of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago.
Although the meltwater was previously believed to have come chiefly from Antarctica, a recent reconstruction by Tarasov and Peltier of ice sheet retreat using a glacial model calibrated by a variety of data points instead to a largely North American source.
Satellites detect a thinning of parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet at lower elevations, and glaciers are disgorging ice into the ocean more rapidly, adding 0.23 to 0.57 mm/yr to the sea within the last decade.
www.giss.nasa.gov /research/briefs/gornitz_09   (1365 words)

  
 Last Ice Age
When the Earth is in its "Ice House" climate mode, there is ice at the poles.
The polar ice sheet expands and contacts because of variations in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles).
The last expansion of the polar ice sheets took place about 18,000 years ago.
www.scotese.com /lastice.htm   (61 words)

  
 Wolf Cave
Based on the sediment level in which these artefacts were found and age calculations from analysis of pollen samples, these artefacts are estimated to be at least 120 000 years old.
This means Neanderthals must have dwelt in the cave prior to the last ice age.
It is even possible that they were there during one of the warmer breaks in the Saale Glaciation, the ice age that preceded the last ice age.
www.susiluola.fi /eng/wolfcave.php   (350 words)

  
 SPACE.com -- Satellite Captures Antarctic Ice Shelf's Collapse
An enormous floating ice shelf in Antarctica that has existed since the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago collapsed this month with staggering speed during one of the warmest summers on record there, scientists say.
In contrast, the Larsen ice shelf is on the Antarctic Peninsula and extends about 1,000 miles closer to the tip of South America than the rest of the Antarctic continent.
The next portion of the ice shelf is known as Larsen C. It is losing stability and could suffer the same fate in the coming years if the warming trend continues, researchers said.
www.space.com /scienceastronomy/planetearth/ice_shelf_020320.html   (867 words)

  
 ScienceDaily: New Study Shows Much Of The World Emerged From Last Ice Age Together
Ice sheet -- An Ice sheet is a mass of glacier ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 square kilometers (19,305 square miles).
Ice age -- An ice age is a period of long-term downturn in the temperature of Earth's climate, resulting in an expansion of the continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers ("glaciation").
Little Ice Age -- The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling lasting approximately from the 14th to the mid-19th centuries, although there is no generally agreed start or end date: some confine the period to...
www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2006/06/060611101855.htm   (2038 words)

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