๐ Planet Earth ๐ง Ice and springs
The Ice Age
๐ In short
An ice age is a very long period in Earth's history when it was cold and huge sheets of ice covered large parts of the continents. The Earth has had several ice ages; the last one ended about ten thousand years ago.
๐คฉ Did you know?
- The oldest known ice age happened more than two billion years ago.
- The last retreat of the ice began less than 20 thousand years ago.
- An important ice age happened about 600 million years ago.
- Antarctica and Greenland are still covered in ice today.
๐ Find out more
๐ Land covered in ice
In the last ice age, ice covered most of Canada and northern Europe, and in some places it was more than a kilometer thick!
๐ The sea dropped
Because lots of water was frozen on land, the sea level dropped, uncovering land bridges between continents that people and animals walked across from Asia to America.
๐ก Ice Age animals
Big animals with thick fur lived then, like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and the saber-toothed cat.
๐ฏ Why does it happen?
Scientists think ice ages happen because of slow changes in how the Earth goes around the Sun, and changes in where the continents and oceans are.
๐งฉ Test yourself
1 Which animal lived in the Ice Age?
2 What happened to the sea in the Ice Age?
3 The last retreat of the ice began less than ?? thousand years ago.
4 Which picture shows โThe Ice Ageโ?
๐ Discover more
๐ท Picture sources: Wikimedia Commons
- Ittiz ยท CC BY-SA 3.0
