Anything But Glacial

After ten thousand years of a balmy interglacial, during which humans learned to till the soil, smelt metal and write down their history, the next glacial period got started around the time of Christ, built gradually over two thousand years, and then was brought to an abrupt halt in 1960. Technically, we’ve been in the same Ice Age for tens of millions of years, swinging between glacial periods (what most people think of as an Ice Age, with ice sheets over Canada and Northern Europe) and interglacial periods (with smaller polar ice caps, but still ice). In the 1970s, some feared that aerosol pollution would cause global cooling and plunge us back into another glacial period. They might have been right, if it weren’t for those pesky industrialists. A glaciation is slow—“it would have taken thousands of years for the cooling to be noticeable”—but the end of this one was anything but. Popular Mechanics reports that researchers at Columbia University studying the remnants of the…

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