What did the world look like during the last ice age?
Was it all endless glaciers and frozen ice? The answer is a partial yes—with some interesting caveats.
The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), colloquially called the last ice age, was a period in Earth’s history that occurred roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago.
This map by cartographer Perrin Remonté offers a snapshot of the Earth from that time, using data of past sea levels and glaciers from research published in 2009, 2014, and 2021, alongside modern-day topographical data.
Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao dives into the differences between the two Earths below.
The Last Ice Age: Low Seas, Exposed Landmasses
During an ice age, sea levels fall as ocean water that evaporates is stored on land on a large scale (ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers) instead of returning to the ocean.
At the time of the LGM, the climate was cold and dry with temperatures that were 6 °C (11 °F) lower on average. Water levels in the ocean were more than 400 feet below what they are now, exposing large areas of the continental shelf.
In the map above, these areas are represented as the gray, dry land most noticeable in a few big patches in Southeast Asia and between Russia and Alaska. Here are a few examples of regions of dry land from 20,000 years ago that are now under water:
- A “lost continent” called Sundaland, a southeastern extension of Asia which forms the island regions of Indonesia today. Some scholars see a connection with this location and the mythical site of Atlantis, though there are many other theories.
- The Bering land bridge, now a strait, connecting Asia and North America. It is central to the theory explaining how ancient humans crossed between the two continents.
- Another land bridge connected the island of Great Britain with the rest of continental Europe. The island of Ireland is in turn connected to Great Britain by a giant ice sheet.
- In Japan, the low water level made the Sea of Japan a lake, and a land bridge connected the region to the Asian mainland. The Yellow Sea—famous as a modern-day fishing location—was completely dry.
The cold temperatures also caused the polar parts of continents to be covered by massive ice sheets, with glaciers forming in mountainous areas.
Flora and Fauna in the Last Ice Age
The dry climate during the last ice age brought about the expansion of deserts and the disappearance of rivers, but some areas saw increased precipitation from falling temperatures.
Most of Canada and Northern Europe was covered with large ice sheets. The U.S. was a mix of ice sheets, alpine deserts, snow forests, semi-arid scrubland and temperate grasslands. Areas that are deserts today—like the Mojave—were filled with lakes. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is a remnant from this time.
Africa had a mix of grasslands in its southern half and deserts in the north—the Sahara Desert existed then as well—and Asia was a mix of tropical deserts in the west, alpine deserts in China, and grasslands in the Indian subcontinent.
Several large animals like the woolly mammoth, the mastodon, the giant beaver, and the saber-toothed tiger roamed the world in extremely harsh conditions, but sadly all are extinct today.
However, not all megafauna from the LGM disappeared forever; many species are still alive, including the Bactrian camel, the tapir, the musk ox, and the white rhinoceros—though the latter is now an endangered species.
Will There Be Another Ice Age?
In a technical sense, we’re still in an “ice age” called the Quaternary Glaciation, which began about 2.6 million years ago. That’s because a permanent ice sheet has existed for the entire time, the Antarctic, which makes geologists call this entire period an ice age.
We are currently in a relatively warmer part of that ice age, described as an interglacial period, which began 11,700 years ago. This geological epoch is known as the Holocene.
Over billions of years, the Earth has experienced numerous glacial and interglacial periods and has had five major ice ages:
It is predicted that temperatures will fall again in a few thousand years, leading to expansion of ice sheets. However there are a dizzying array of factors that are still not understood well enough to say comprehensively what causes (or ends) ice ages.
A popular explanation says the degree of the Earth’s axial tilt, its wobble, and its orbital shape, are the main factors heralding the start and end of this phenomenon.
The variations in all three lead to a change in how much prolonged sunlight parts of the world receive, which in turn can cause the creation or melting of ice sheets. But these take thousands of years to coincide and cause a significant change in climate.
Furthermore, current industrial activities have warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.
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Nice final paragraph/ sentence. /s
Anyway, why would you include the land bridge theory of human migration to the Americas but also start with a map which shows that to be impossible?
Sorry 😞 I couldn’t see the map clearly on my phone. It looked like it showed glaciers across the land bridge.
The theory is still b.s. though.
I knew it! I Knew It!!! the last line…..
No wonder they/Them/It didn’t have more research to prove the cooling we are going into. Sounds like it was agenda driven. ZeroHedge has become suspect for me about 18 months ago.
ZH has been a bad joke for years.
ZeroHedge is a bastion of free speech…until you refer to a fudgepacker as a fudgepacker, then they ban you.
Shouldn’t they at least mention that several theories forecast the begin of a “mini”-ice age (like Maunder minimum) around 2030?
I’m just glad they didn’t build the Titanic back in those days, dang thing would have never made it out of the harbor.
Are you sure it’s the Titanic — and not the Olympic?
The Olympanic.
The Titampic?
My freezer that needs a defrost?
You see, all the remnant pockets of hunter gatherers should have used their suv’s and spewed carbon more to warm the planet.
Uniformitarianism with a sugar coating of man made climate change. sigh.
Uniformitarianism
Exactly.
I love how every map of past earth “eras” always presents the current earth axis as “always been”
The paths of Island chains tattle though.
Chains and keys are some of the keys to
uncoding earth’s past rotational axes.
“…The Poles are shifting at an ever accelerating Pace!”
“Chains and keys are some of the keys to
uncoding earth’s past rotational axes.”
“Furthermore, current industrial activities have warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.”
Standard non cited green boilerplate nonsense to appease who?
“Furthermore, current distilled alcohol production and consumption has warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.”
Sounds truthy.
“Furthermore, current renewable energy policies have warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.”
Wow, it works with anything!
“Furthermore, current levels of lemonade consumption have warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.”
If one doesn’t prove a claim with a source, it’s the frigging wild wild west all over again.
“Furthermore, current levels of article citation have warmed the climate considerably and may in fact delay the next ice age by 50,000-100,000 years.”
The final sentence/paragraph is wrong … for me, it calls the entire article into question …
You’d have to work a bit to draw such a wrong ‘conclusion’ from prior data unless that data, too, is incorrect or misunderstood.
wrong in more ways than one!
1. “industrial emissions” are not warming the planet. This is an old pretext for a one world socialist dictatorship hatched in the 1940s, and evidence does not support that the warmup since the Dalton Minimum was anything but a rebound from the Little Ice Age. Not that human influence is zero, but it ain’t much.
2. Warm weather does NOT prevent glaciations. The last interglacial was several degrees C warmer than this one, with less ice and much higher sea levels, but it terminated on time. And when did our Quarternary ice age begin? During the warm and balmy Pliocene!
3. Previous interglacials also experienced short bursts of global warming–in their final phase.
4. Right now, many glaciers are growing (as is normal) and in recent years we even saw a thickening of Arctic ice. What does this mean? If current global mean temperature will not stop small glaciers from growing when local or regional conditions are right, then it will not prevent big ones either!
5. That Berger&Loutre paper from 20 years ago was WRONG! Summer insolation in the Arctic is ALREADY below levels where at least two prior interglacials terminated. And we will stay there for at least the next thousand years.
6. When will our interglacial end? Most likely sometime in the next 500 years:
https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2022/egusphere-2022-569/egusphere-2022-569.pdf
Hubris is followed by Nemesis. Pride goeth before the fall. Pride. Pride month and global warming are both examples of hubris.
“I’m proud of my record on humility.”
“I hate nemesis to pieces!”
“Local library to hold tranny story book hour with “Pride and Hubris”, two 75 year old former Pres Clinton aides, who now self identify as 10 year old Japanese schoolgirls-kidnapped and forced into fishmonger slavery at a sleazy Bangkok sushi bar.”
I’m going to guess the world was pretty White during the last ice age.
I think it was just yesterday I was saying here that we are still in the edges of the “Little Ice Age” that started to ease in the late 1880’s. I would not be surprised if we would slip back into extreme temps in the areas indicated on the map. Canada has already had a bad bout with -40 degree winters for the last few years. That map is not even that accurate, glaciers covered the eastern US down almost to southern Indiana 20,000 years ago.
If TPTB tells you we are over heating, you can bet we are cooling.