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 ...

Thomas Mulligan explains how Earth's orbital changes trigger ice ages every 100,000 years through astronomical cycles.

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. The ...

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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.

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 ...

Read science articles on the ice age, glaciation and climatology. Discover the connection between ice ages and global warming.

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.