Ice age

  

An artist's impression of ice age Earth at glacial maximum. Based on: Crowley, T.J. (1995). "Ice age terrestrial carbon changes revisited". Global Biogeochemical Cycles 9 (3): 377–389. Bibcode 1995GBioC...9..377C. doi:10.1029/95GB01107.

The Antarctic ice sheet. Ice sheets expand during an ice age.

Variations in temperature, CO₂, and dust from the Vostok ice core over the last 400,000 years

An ice age, or more precisely, a glacial age, is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, 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.^[1] By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still