What is an Ice Age and when was the last one?
Throughout the Earth’s history its climate has fluctuated between periods of warmth and periods of sustained cold known as ice ages. An ice age is composed of periods of warmer weather called interglacials that last 10,000-40,000 years, and periods of intense cold (glaciations) in which glaciers advance over much of the northern parts of continents. People normally think of these glaciations or glacial periods as an ice age. Although the last of these glacial periods ended 10,000 years ago, we do in fact live in what scientists call the Holocene, an interglacial period of the Pleistocene ice age.
