Articles about 'ice age'

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey have uncovered the first direct evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet shrunk suddenly and dramatically at the end of the Last Ice Age, around 8,000 years ago.

Three 11,500-year-old deer skull headdresses – excavated from a world-renowned archaeological site in Yorkshire – will go on display, one for the first time, at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) from today.

What connects a series of volcanic eruptions and severe summer cooling with a century of pandemics, human migration and the rise and fall of civilisations? Tree rings, says Ulf Büntgen, who leads Cambridge’s first dedicated tree-ring laboratory in the Department of Geography.

Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years – revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to enter the Americas, as traditionally thought.

The way the ocean transported heat, nutrients and carbon dioxide at the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, is significantly different than what has previously been suggested, according to two new studies. The findings suggest that the colder ocean circulated at a very slow rate, which enabled it to store much more carbon for much longer than the modern ocean.

Researchers have found that glacial erosion and melting ice caps both played a key role in driving the observed global increase in volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age. 

A new study of how the structure of the ocean has changed since the end of the last ice age suggest that the melting of a vast ‘lid’ of sea ice caused the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Populations of hunter-gatherers weathered Ice Age in apparent isolation in Caucasus mountain region for millennia, later mixing with other ancestral populations, from which emerged the Yamnaya culture that would bring this Caucasus hunter-gatherer lineage to Western Europe.

A video project demonstrates how academic research can be communicated in an engaging format that puts across complex ideas in a nutshell.

Study successfully reconstructed temperature from the deep sea to reveal how global ice volume has varied over the glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 1.5 million years.