Ice age

An ice age is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or alternatively "glacials" or "glaciations" or colloquially as "ice age"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, we are in an interglacial period—the Holocene—of the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets still exist.

Origin of ice age theory

In 1742 Pierre Martel (1706–1767), an engineer and geographer living in Geneva, visited the valley of Chamonix in the Alps of Savoy. Two years later he published an account of his journey. He reported that the inhabitants of that valley attributed the dispersal of erratic boulders to the glaciers, saying that they had once extended much farther. Later similar explanations were reported from other regions of the Alps. In 1815 the carpenter and chamois hunter Jean-Pierre Perraudin (1767–1858) explained erratic boulders in the Val de Bagnes in the Swiss canton of Valais as being due to glaciers previously extending further. An unknown woodcutter from Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland advocated a similar idea in a discussion with the Swiss-German geologist Jean de Charpentier (1786–1855) in 1834. Comparable explanations are also known from the Val de Ferret in the Valais and the Seeland in western Switzerland and in Goethe's scientific work. Such explanations could also be found in other parts of the world. When the Bavarian naturalist Ernst von Bibra (1806–1878) visited the Chilean Andes in 1849–1850, the natives attributed fossil moraines to the former action of glaciers.

Ice age (disambiguation)

An ice age is a geologic period of major glaciation.

Ice Age may also refer to:

Science

Music

Film

2012: Ice Age

2012: Ice Age is a 2011 disaster film produced by the independent film group The Asylum. It is the third and final film in The Asylum's 2012 trilogy, which are mockbusters of the Roland Emmerich film 2012.

Plot

Bill Hart and his son, Nelson drive his daughter Julia to the airport. Bill contacts Dr. Divya who informs Bill a team of scientists he works with has left Iceland. Divya is able to tell Bill an entire range of volcanoes has erupted and a 200-mile long ice shelf is breaking apart before he is killed by the volcanic eruptions. While Bill is distracted, Julia heads into the airport. At his office, Bill is advised to leave Maine and head to the West as soon as he can to avoid the destruction of the glacier. Bill and Nelson head to the Senator’s office and pick up his wife Teri. The glacier travels at high speeds, races towards the East Coast of North America, bringing heavy snow and giant hail. The Air Force attempts to break apart the glacier with aerial attacks, but fails.