What was the Ice age?

We live in the Space Age, all set to visit other worlds.. Tr1.ere was once a Stone Age when our ancestors used tools made of stone. There was also an Ice Age, chilly enough to make Space Agers shudder. But some of the Stone Agers lived through an Ice Age and coped with it.

Each year we get spring and summer, fall and winter. The tropics have four warmer seasons then we do and the poles have four colder seasons. These weathery pictures are climates and we take them for granted. But the earth is very old and, like a fair lady, she likes to change. Alaska was once as warm as the tropics and India was ~~.:% blanketed with ice. But in these long ago climate changes, each year still had its four seasons.

An Ice Age is a spell of chilly climate, maybe thousands of years ago.  In the dim past there have been several Ice Ages. North America has suffered through four of them. The last one started to way about 40,000 years ago.

It began gently. The winters got colder, frostier and snowier. The summers got cooler. After perhaps a thousand years, the summers were not warm enough to melt all the winter's snow. The next winter brought more snow to join it and the frosty weather froze it into sheets of ice. An icy glacier formed in eastern Canada, another near Hudson Bay and a third in western Canada;.

With a glacier ice sheet is 150 feet thick, it begins to spread. The edges of the Ice Age glaciers pushed southward, maybe a few feet each year. The ice was perhaps some miles thick and in some places it crept half way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The earth was crushed beneath it, mountain peaks were clawed away, rocks were scratched by icy fingers, stones and gravel were carried along with the moving ice for hundreds of miles.

The birds and the four footed beasties moved south where the climate was comfortably warm.. The plants could not escape. They were crushed and frozen under the cruel ices Then, after countless years, the summer days grew warmer. The edges of the glaciers began to melt and run away in icy streams. Slowly the ice fields backed up to the north. The long spell of wintery climate was over and the Ice Ate came to an end.

We do not know why Ice Ages come and go. But we know a lot about them., for their icy clews left scars and scratches on the earth, The Ice Age summers, we theorize were warmer than our winters. But they were not warm enough to melt the winter snow. So the summers could not stop the glaciers from growing and creeping year by year over the land.