Will ice age return?

Our current, more hospitable geological epoch, the Holocene, is a brief respite. Today’s glaciers have been in retreat for the past 12,000 years.

We’re living in an ice age. For most of the past 2.5 million years, much of the planet has been glaciated, as Antarctica still is today.

Our current, more hospitable geological epoch, the Holocene, is a brief respite. Today’s glaciers have been in retreat for the past 12,000 years. Geologists call this an interglacial, and caution us not to get used to it. Interglacials are caused by cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit, and have nothing to do with humaninduced climate change.

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The ice could be on schedule to return as soon as the next several millennia — but only if we don’t totally cook the planet in the interim.

The fact that the world was once iced over wasn’t known until the 19th century, when Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz noted that attributes of the glacial landscape seen in the Alps could also be found far from any mountains.

Charles Darwin was initially incredulous that glaciers once had predominated — but later remarked that it was incredible he had failed to notice the evidence that Agassiz made appear obvious. But then glaciers are full of surprises. Glaciers are the mass of ice moving like a river.

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