First, what is an ice age? It’s when the Earth has cold temperatures for a long time – millions to tens of millions of years – that lead to ice sheets and glaciers covering large areas of its surface.

Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis suggests ...

Large changes in global sea level, fueled by fluctuations in ice sheet growth and decay, occurred throughout the last ice age ...

The Earth’s climate is a dynamic entity, continuously evolving over billions of years with alternating periods of extreme heat and cold. Recent scientific studies indicate that the Earth is subtly ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

Changes in Earth's tilt relative to the sun have governed the movements of giant ice sheets over the past 800,000 years, triggering the start and end of eight ice ages, new research suggests. The new ...

Throughout most of Earth's geological history, its paleoclimate has remained hospitable to life—largely thanks to continental ...

When the planet was heating up at the end of the last Ice Age, ice-melt flooded out by glaciers made oceans rise. Scientists ...

A new study shows farming and livestock reshaped global mammal communities, collapsing natural boundaries after the last Ice ...