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Hello, 20,000 years ago, a much of Northern Europe was covered in thick ice, a prehistoric

visitor to what is now in the British Isles would have found much of the north covered

by an ice sheet while even the south would have been barren and freezing cold.

This episode from our past is frequently called the Ice Age, but that's not strictly accurate.

In fact, the latest Ice Age began millions of years ago and we sit in it.

We went to Merit Room It until the ice caps in Greenland and the Antarctic melt sometime

in the distant future.

Ice Age is a period of dramatic global cooling.

Earth has experienced several of these episodes in its history, some of them hundreds of

millions of years ago.

They have had a huge effect on the way the planet looks and on the organisms living on

it.

But how do we know about Ice Age is what causes them and why do they come to an end?

We've meet to discuss Ice Age's r.

Jane Francis, professor of paleoclamatology at the University of Leeds.

Richard Corfield, a visiting research fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford

University, and Carrie Lear, senior lecturer in paleoceanography at Cardiff University.

Richard Corfield, I've just mentioned in the introduction that the term Ice Age is often

misused.

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