What are 5 facts about the ice age?

Fun Facts about Ice Age for Kids

• During ice ages, glaciers carve out the landscape, leaving deep valleys.
• During the last cold period, ocean waters were frozen and coastal areas dried out. A narrow strip of land between Siberia and Alaska appeared.
• The Earth has experienced at least five ice ages.

What triggers an Ice Age?

The variation of sunlight reaching Earth is one cause of ice ages. When less sunlight reaches the northern latitudes, temperatures drop and more water freezes into ice, starting an ice age. When more sunlight reaches the northern latitudes, temperatures rise, ice sheets melt, and the ice age ends.

What happened during the ice age for kids?

An ice age is a period in Earth’s history when the ice on the polar caps significantly expanded due to an overall lowering of the Earth’s global temperatures. During these periods land in North America and Northern Europe were covered by giant ice fields and glaciers.

What was life like in the ice age?

Since most of the water on Earth’s surface was ice, there was little precipitation and rainfall was about half of what it is today. During peak periods with most of the water frozen, global average temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees C (9 to 18 degrees F) below today’s temperature norms.

How long do ice ages last?

The current geological period, the Quaternary, which began about 2.6 million years ago and extends into the present, is marked by warm and cold episodes, cold phases called glacials (Quaternary ice age) lasting about 100,000 years, and which are then interrupted by the warmer interglacials which lasted about 10,000– …

Is the Earth in an ice age?

Correctly speaking, Earth remains in an ice age. Ice still sits thick atop Greenland and Antarctica, holding enough water to raise sea levels by hundreds of feet; and in recent decades, the ice sheets have begun to melt more rapidly.

Why was the ice age important?

The important thing about ice ages is that they change the character of the Earth’s surface. Each glaciation changes the Earth’s appearance. It may be subtle, small changes each time, but there is a progressive change.

What are the 5 Ice Ages?

The five major ice ages in the paleo record include the Huronian glaciation (2.4 billion to 2.1 billion years ago), the Cryogenian glaciation (720 million to 635 million years ago), the Andean-Saharan glaciation (450 million to 420 million years ago), the Late Paleozoic ice age (335 million to 260 million years ago) …