How Earth’s Orbit Triggers Ice Ages For decades, scientists have suspected that Earth’s changing orbit plays a crucial role in long-term climate shifts. These orbital variations, known as ...

Rocks on Iceland beaches confirm the Late Antique Little Ice Age, caused by volcanic eruptions, precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire.

Changes in Earth's tilt relative to the sun have governed the movements of giant ice sheets over the past 800,000 years, triggering the start and end of eight ice ages, new research suggests.

As glaciers melt around the world, long-dormant volcanoes may be waking up beneath the ice. New research reveals that massive ...

Scientists say small changes in the way the Earth orbits the sun hold the key in major global changes in climate, like ice ages.

Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis ...

Sea level on Earth has been rising and falling ever since there was water on the planet. Scientists were already able to use ...

Nearly 10,000 years ago, Earth came out of its most recent ice age. Vast, icy swaths of land around the poles thawed, melting the glaciers that had covered them for nearly 100,000 years. Why ...

The Ice Age Has Nothing on ‘Snowball Earth’ Five hundred million years before the dawn of dinosaurs, strange animals ruled a frozen planet.

Natural cycles in Earth's rotational axis and its orbit around the sun drive climatic changes, and now researchers have matched up specific points in those cycles to the timing of ice ages.

The Earth has had at least five major ice ages, and humans showed up in time for the most recent one. In fact, we’re still in it.