Jason Lee Thompson

Earth is still in an Ice Age, and almost nobody knows it. Ice ages don't end when the glaciers melt; they end when all polar ice disappears completely. Right now, ice still covers Antarctica and the Arctic; which means by scientific definition we are still in an Ice Age. What we are living in - right now - is called an interglacial period, a warm pause, a temporary thaw between glacial advances. The current interglacial - called the Holocene - began about 11,700 years ago. Every human civilisation, that has ever existed - Ancient Egypt, Rome, China - all of it happened inside this single warm pause. And here is what makes this deeply unsettling; in the last 2.58 million years the Earth has cycled through at least 50 glacial advances. The warm pauses between them typically last 10,000 to 30,000 years. We are already 11,700 years into ours. The ice cores drilled from Antarctica tells us exactly what happened before. Every interglacial ends; every one! The temperature drops, the glaciers advance, and ice sheets kilometres thick crush everything beneath them. During the last Glacial Maximum just 20,000 years ago, ice sheets covered most of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. New York City was under a kilometre of ice. And none of that required a catastrophe. It happened slowly and quietly, driven by wobbles in Earth's orbit around the Sun, called the Milankovitch cycles. The next glacial advance will come; not tomorrow, not in our lifetime. But it will come. We are not living 'after' the Ice Age: We're living inside it. facebook.com/share/v/1MaGGCR…