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.

"In an era of warming climate, the study of the ice age past is now more important than ever. This book examines the wonders of the Quaternary ice age - to show how ice age landscapes and ecosystems were repeatedly and rapidly transformed as plants, animals, and humans reorganized their worlds." --Publisher.

It is not possible to understand the present or future climate unless scientists can account for the enormous and rapid cycles of glaciation that have taken place over the last million years, and which are expected to continue into the future. A great deal has happened in the theory of the ice ages over the last decade, and it is now widley accepted that ice ages are driven by changes in the Earth's orbit. The study of ice ages is very inter-disciplinary, covering geology, physics, glaciology, oceanography, atmospheric science, planetary orbit calculations astrophysics and statistics.

This book studies the history and gives an analysis of extreme climate change on Earth. In order to provide a long-term perspective, the first chapter briefly reviews some of the wild gyrations that occurred in the Earth’s climate hundreds of millions of years ago: snowball Earth and hothouse Earth. Coming closer to modern times, the effects of continental drift, particularly the closing of the Isthmus of Panama are believed to have contributed to the advent of ice ages in the past three million years. This first chapter sets the stage for a discussion of ice ages in the geological recent past (i.e. within the last three million years, with an emphasis on the last few hundred thousand years). The second chapter discusses geological evidence for ice ages – how geologists surmised their existence prior to actual subsurface data that proved the theory. The following two chapters look at ice cores (primarily from Greenland and Antarctica). Chapter 3 discusses how ice core data is processed and Chapter 4 summarizes data obtained from ice cores. Chapter 5 discusses the processing of data obtained from ocean sediments, and summarizes the results, while the following chapter discusses data from other sources, such as "Devil’s Cave." Chapter 7 summarizes the experimental results from Chapters 4, 5, and 6. It provides the foundation for comparison with theories in later chapters. In a perfect world, this data would be totally separate and disconnected from theory. Unfortunately, as the author shows, dating of much of the data was accomplished by "tuning" to the astronomical theory, which introduces circular reasoning. Chapter 8 provides a brief overview of the various theories that have been devised to "explain" the patterns of alternating ice ages and interglacials that have occurred over the past three million years. This serves as an introduction to the following three chapters which presents the astronomical theory in its various manifestations, compare the astronomical theory with data, and then compare other theories with data. Finally, Chapter 12 summarizes what we think we know about ice ages and, more importantly, what we don’t know.

The second edition of this book has been completely updated. It studies the history and gives an analysis of extreme climate change on Earth. In order to provide a long-term perspective, the first chapter briefly reviews some of the wild gyrations that occurred in the Earth's climate hundreds of millions of years ago: snowball Earth and hothouse Earth. Coming closer to modern times, the effects of continental drift, particularly the closing of the Isthmus of Panama are believed to have contributed to the advent of ice ages in the past three million years. This first chapter sets the stage for a discussion of ices ages in the geological recent past (i.e. within the last three million years, with an emphasis on the last few hundred thousand years).

This is a discount Black and white version. Some images may be unclear, please see BCCampus website for the digital version.This book was born out of a 2014 meeting of earth science educators representing most of the universities and colleges in British Columbia, and nurtured by a widely shared frustration that many students are not thriving in courses because textbooks have become too expensive for them to buy. But the real inspiration comes from a fascination for the spectacular geology of western Canada and the many decades that the author spent exploring this region along with colleagues, students, family, and friends. My goal has been to provide an accessible and comprehensive guide to the important topics of geology, richly illustrated with examples from western Canada. Although this text is intended to complement a typical first-year course in physical geology, its contents could be applied to numerous other related courses.

Historically, climate fluctuations, such as the Little Ice Age, show that interglacial climate chage in not entirely stable, but responds to even subtle changes in radiative forcing. Through research, it has been made clear that even an abrupt change of climate within years is not just a theoretical possibility but has in fact happened in the prehistoric past. It is therefore clear that in principal it could happen again. Human civilaization has exploded under the mild and relatively stable climatic conditions that have prevailed over the last 11,000 years. This book focuses on revisiting the past and to study climate and environment in a suite of experiments where boundary conditions are similar but not identical to today so we can learn about the climate-environment system, its sensitivity, thresholds and feedback. The palaeoclimate community holds an important key to scientific information on climate change that provides a basis for appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies. The authors of this book have taken up this challenge and summarize their results in this special volume. It presents state-of-the-art science on new reconstructions from all spheres of the Earth System and on their synthesis, on methodological advances, and on the current ability of numerical models to simulate low and high frequency changes of climate, environment, and chemical cycling related to interglacials.* Summarizes important information on climate change, providing a basis for appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies for human civilization* Reports on new reconstuctions on methodological advances, numerical models simulating low and high frequence changes, and chemical cycling related to interglacials* Incorporates palaeovegetaion and numerical modeling of climate and environmental and geochemical parameters to address regional feedback to global change with successful data-models