Variations in temperature, CO₂, and dust from the Vostok, Antarctica ice core over the last 400,000 years

Rise of temperature at the end of the last ice age

An ice age is a period when for a long time the temperature of Earth's climate is very low. This leads to an expansion of the continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers.

'Ice age' is a term used in palaeoclimatology for the period of extensive ice sheets in the recent Pleistocene period. We now know that ice ages have happened a number of times in the past, the greatest and longest of which took place in the Proterozoic era, before multi-cellular eukaryotes evolved.