the.com/glaciation
Earth's slowest bulldozer, carving continents at a pace that makes erosion look rushed.
means The process by which ice sheets and glaciers form, spread across the land, and reshape it through accumulation, movement, and melting.
from Traces to Latin 'glacies,' meaning ice, which gave French 'glace' and eventually the English 'glacier' — borrowed in the 18th-19th centuries to describe the slow-moving rivers of ice seen in the Alps. 'Glaciation' was then coined as the scientific noun for the broader process and its ages, once geologists realized the scratched rocks and displaced boulders scattered across whole continents were evidence that ice, not flood or legend, had once crept across the land.
- ice sheets
- once buried Chicago under a mile of ice
- sea levels
- dropped 400 feet, exposing land bridges
- cycle length
- roughly 100,000 years, driven by orbital wobbles
- current status
- technically still in an ice age, interglacial phase