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Posted by on Oct 8, 2018 in TellMeWhy |

When Were the Ice Ages?

When Were the Ice Ages?

When Were the Ice Ages? The Ice Ages ended about 10,000 years ago after lasting about two million years. At its greatest extent the ice covered nearly 30 per cent of the land surface of the world, compared with about 10 per cent today. The great glaciers reached as far south in America as present day Nebraska and Kansas and extended over the whole of northern Europe down to a line linking London and Berlin.

But there were a number of intervals when temperatures rose and the ice retreated temporarily to its present limits. During these warm periods, which totaled several hundred years, the liberated areas were repopulated. The climate is believed to have been warmer at times than it is today.

There have been at least five major ice ages in the Earth’s history (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo Ice Age, and the current Quaternary Ice Age). Outside these ages, the Earth seems to have been ice free even in high latitudes.

Rocks from the earliest well established ice age, called the Huronian, formed around 2.4 to 2.1 Ga (billion years) ago during the early Proterozoic Eon. Several hundreds of km of the Huronian Supergroup is exposed 10–100 km north of the north shore of Lake Huron extending from near Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury, northeast of Lake Huron, with giant layers of now-lithified till beds, dropstones, varves, outwash, and scoured basement rocks.

Correlative Huronian deposits have been found near Marquette, Michigan, and correlation has been made with Paleoproterozoic glacial deposits from Western Australia. The Huronian ice age was caused by the elimination of atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas, during the Great Oxygenation Event.

The next well-documented ice age, and probably the most severe of the last billion years, occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which glacial ice sheets reached the equator, possibly being ended by the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as CO2 produced by volcanoes.

“The presence of ice on the continents and pack ice on the oceans would inhibit both silicate weathering and photosynthesis, which are the two major sinks for CO2 at present.” It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian explosion, though this model is recent and controversial.

The Andean-Saharan occurred from 460 to 420 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician and the Silurian period.

The evolution of land plants at the onset of the Devonian period caused a long term increase in planetary oxygen levels and reduction of CO2 levels, which resulted in the Karoo Ice Age. It is named after the glacial tills found in the Karoo region of South Africa, where evidence for this ice age was first clearly identified.

There were extensive polar ice caps at intervals from 360 to 260 million years ago in South Africa during the Carboniferous and early Permian Periods. Correlatives are known from Argentina, also in the center of the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland.

The Quaternary Glaciation / Quaternary Ice Age started about 2.58 million years ago at the beginning of the Quaternary Periodwhen the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial periods, glacials or glacial advances, and interglacial periods, interglacials or glacial retreats.

greenland and antarctic ice sheet

The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.

The definition of the Quaternary as beginning 2.58 Ma is based on the formation of the Arctic ice cap. The Antarctic ice sheet began to form earlier, at about 34 Ma, in the mid-Cenozoic (Eocene-Oligocene Boundary). The term Late Cenozoic Ice Age is used to include this early phase.

Ice ages can be further divided by location and time; for example, the names Riss (180,000–130,000 years bp) and Würm (70,000–10,000 years bp) refer specifically to glaciation in the Alpine region. The maximum extent of the ice is not maintained for the full interval. The scouring action of each glaciation tends to remove most of the evidence of prior ice sheets almost completely, except in regions where the later sheet does not achieve full coverage.

Content for this question contributed by Tom Lacey, resident of McKees Rocks, Allegheny County, western Pennsylvania, USA