Nothing new from the Ice Age? Far from it! Barely ten years have passed since the first edition of this book was published, but in that time researchers around the world have developed new methods and published their findings in scientific journals. Consequently, ideas about the course of the Ice Age have changed dramatically. The sequence of the individual ice advances, the direction of ice movement and the direction of meltwater drainage are only partially known, but they can be reconstructed. This book offers in-depth information about the state of the investigations. Ice ages are the periods of the earth's history in which at least one polar region is glaciated or covered by sea ice. Thus, we are currently living in an Ice Age. The present Ice Age is also the period in which humans started to intervene in the shaping of the earth. The results are obvious. Aerial and satellite images can be used to trace the melting of glaciers, but also the decay of the Arctic permafrost, and the clearing of the Brazilian rainforest. This book is a translation of the original German 2nd edition Das Eiszeitalter by Juergen Ehlers, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and promotes technologies to support the authors.

Ice Age Earth provides the first detailed review of global environmental change in the Late Quaternary. Significant geological and climatic events are analysed within a review of glacial and periglacial history. The melting history of the last ice sheets reveals that complex, dynamic and catastrophic change occurred, change which affected the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans and the stability of the Earth's crust.

The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850. The effects on the landscape and the daily life of people have been particularly apparent in Norway and the Alps. This major book places an extensive body of material relating to Europe, in the form of documentary evidence of the history of the glaciers, their portrayal in paintings and maps, and measurements made by scientists and others, within a global perspective. It shows that the glacial history of mountain regions all over the world displays a similar pattern of climatic events. Furthermore, fluctuations on a comparable scale have occurred at intervals of a millennium or two throughout the last ten thousand years since the ice caps of North America and northwest Europe melted away. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the Little Ice Age, by an author whose research experience of the subject has been extensive. This book includes large numbers of maps, diagrams and photographs, many not published elsewhere, and very full bibliographies. It is a definitive work on the subject, and an excellent focus for the work of economic and social historians as well as glaciologists, climatologists, geographers, and specialists in mountain environment.

The fascinating story of how a harsh terrain that resembled modern Antarctica has been transformed gradually into the forests, grasslands, and wetlands we know today.

The reader's choices determine whether three friends will survive after being mysteriously transported back in time to when the climate was cold and saber-toothed cats and wooly mammoths roamed the land.