How cold was the earth during the ancient ice age?

If I told you that the Ice Age was neither ancient nor cold, would you believe it?

? What we usually call the Ice Age is actually called the "Quaternary Ice Age" in academia. This Ice Age started 2.58 million years ago and ended 12,000 years ago, so we also call it the "Quaternary Ice Age." "Glacial Age" is the last ice age.

Since it’s called the Ice Age, there must be spectacular glaciers everywhere, right? This is not the case. Glaciers during the Ice Age were mainly concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, and the glacier area once reached 52 million square kilometers, equivalent to one-third of the land area. Take the European continent as an example. From the North Pole to the south, glaciers cover all of Northern Europe, most of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the Baltic countries and northern Russia, as well as the entire Baltic Sea and part of the North Sea.

Illustration: Thick glaciers once covered most of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. The picture is from the Internet

Illustration: During the Ice Age of the Earth, you can see white ice caps mainly located in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere. , pictures from the Internet

Illustration: In Europe during the Ice Age, white areas were covered by glaciers. Pictures from the Internet

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? In addition to extending from the pole Large areas of glaciers, high-altitude Alps have also formed alpine glaciers, glacial movement has changed the landscape, the famous Matterhorn is left behind by glacial movement.

Illustration: The steep Matterhorn in the Alps is the result of glaciation. The picture comes from the Internet

The thickness of the glaciers covering the northern hemisphere is more than 1,000 meters. Where does so much ice come from? ? The answer is the ocean. Precisely because the sea water froze into glaciers, the sea level at that time was more than 100 meters lower than today. The area of ????the land expanded instead, and many straits became land. You can walk north from Normandy, France, across the English Channel to London, or you can go from From Beijing, you can walk eastward through the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Tsushima Strait to Tokyo. As long as you have good foot strength, you can even go all the way east across the Bering Land Bridge into North America. Let’s walk to New York!

Illustration: During the Ice Age, the land area of ??the Earth was much larger than today. The picture comes from the Internet.

?There were so many glaciers during the Ice Age. Was it very, very cold? It was definitely colder than now, but not particularly cold. The average annual temperature at that time was 10℃ lower than today. It was indeed cold in winter, but it was very cool when summer arrived! During the Ice Age, there lived a more spectacular community of terrestrial vertebrates than today. The ones we are familiar with include mammoths, woolly rhinos, lions, etc.

Illustration: In Spain during the Ice Age, you can see mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and other large animals. The pictures are from the Internet

? Introducing so much knowledge about the Ice Age, everyone You must be curious about why ice ages occur? There are many explanations for the cause of the Ice Age, but they all have to do with the decrease in solar exposure and heat received. Whether it is the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, the change in the angle between the equator and the ecliptic, or the obstruction of cosmic matter and volcanic ash, in short, the cause of the ice age is that the earth receives less heat from the sun.

? In fact, in the history of the earth, there have been many large-scale ice ages, the most violent of which should be the "Snowball Earth" that occurred between 800 million and 550 million years ago. "In the incident, even the equator was icing, and the entire earth looked like a "snowball" from space!

Caption: The earth in the "Snowball Earth" incident, the picture comes from the Internet

Picture/Internet (infringement and deletion)

Text/Jiang's Thief Dragon (Jiang Hong)

Typesetting/Microraptor Jiang's