Ice Ages
Publicthe Huronian glaciation
The earliest known major ice age, which gripped the young Earth almost two billion years ago.
Snowball Earth: the Cryogenian ice age
One of the most extreme ice ages ever, in which the entire planet may have been covered with ice from pole to equator.
The Andean-Saharan ice age
An ice age during the Ordovician and Silurian that coincided with one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history.
The Karoo Ice Age
A prolonged ice age during the Carboniferous and Permian that drastically changed the appearance of the supercontinent Gondwana.
the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet
The beginning of the earth's current long-term cooling, with the first permanent ice sheet on Antarctica.
The onset of the Plio-Pleistocene ice age
The start of the series of ice ages and interglacials that have alternately affected the northern hemisphere to this day.
The Last Glacial Maximum
The coldest point of the last ice age, when enormous ice sheets covered North America and Northern Europe and sea levels were metres lower.
The end of the last ice age and the start of the Holocene
The rapid warming that melted the ice sheets and ushered in the current, relatively stable climatic era.
The Anthropocene: humans as a climate factor
The current era, in which human emissions of greenhouse gases threaten to disrupt the natural rhythm of ice ages and interglacial periods.
a future ice age
A speculative look at a distant future in which the earth, after centuries of human-induced warming, may nonetheless enter a new ice age.
the Huronian glaciation
This ice age followed the Great Oxidation Event, when cyanobacteria began producing oxygen on a massive scale. The now oxygen-rich atmosphere broke down the greenhouse gas methane, causing the Earth to cool and possibly become largely covered in ice. Life still consisted solely of single-celled organisms surviving in the oceans, while the land surface formed a bare, frozen backdrop devoid of any vegetation.