The end of the last glacial period, which was about 10,000 years ago, is often called the end of the ice age, although extensive year-round ice persists in Antarctica and Greenland. Over the past few million years, the glacial-interglacial cycles have been "paced" by periodic variations in the Earth's orbit via Milankovitch cycles .

By 40,000 years ago they had become extinct and modern humans had reached Britain. But even their occupations were brief and intermittent due to a climate which swung between low temperatures with a tundra habitat and severe ice ages which made Britain uninhabitable for …

During the last 2.6 million years, a period of time known as the Quaternary, the climate has switched in and out of ice ages. During these ice ages, kilometre-thick ice sheets covered large portions of the northern hemisphere, including Britain and Ireland.

There is no permanent ice cover in the UK today. However, 20,000 years ago, it was a very different situation when most of the UK was covered by an expanded Arctic ice sheet. The ice was three kilometres thick in places. Large bodies of ice, called glaciers flowed slowly from highlands to lowland areas.

2018年6月5日 · An interactive online map produced by researchers at the University of Sheffield reveals how major cities were affected by the last glacial cycle 22,000 years ago – when a kilometre-thick ice...

2020年8月12日 · Evidence for at least three major ice sheets is preserved in the sedimentary record on land in Britain and Ireland. These were the Anglian (between 478,000 and 424,000 years ago), the Wolstonian (between 300,000 and 130,000 years ago) and the Devensian (approximately 27,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum ) 1 .

2025年1月19日 · The unique maps record the pattern and speed of shrinkage of the large ice sheet that covered the British Isles during the last Ice Age, approximately 20,000 years ago. The sheet, which subsumed most of Britain, Ireland and the North Sea, had an ice volume sufficient to raise global sea level by around 2.5 metres when it melted.

The extreme cold of the Ice Ages in Britain probably forced humans to leave when living conditions became impossible, but they returned during warmer periods. A final Ice Age covered Britain around 70,000 to 12,000 BC. The landscape during the Ice Ages was treeless tundra with glaciers covering northern and sometimes southern Britain. During

In Britain the ice sheet reached the Isles of Scilly and the Western Approaches, the furthest south the ice reached in any Pleistocene ice age. [7] In the south-east of England it diverted the River Thames from its old course through the Vale of St Albans south to its present position.

At its peak, about 22,000 years ago, a large ice sheet covered all of Scotland and went as far south as England’s Midlands area. About 15,000 years ago, the climate warmed rapidly. Dramatic landscape changes occurred as: