While the Milankovitch Cycles operate on timescales far longer than human lifespans, their effects are always at play.

Earth’s path around the Sun is not a fixed racetrack but a slowly shifting orbit, and those subtle changes have a long history of reshaping the planet’s climate. As astronomers refine how these ...

First, what is an ice age? It’s when the Earth has cold temperatures for a long time – millions to tens of millions of years – that lead to ice sheets and glaciers covering large areas of its surface.

New reconstructions of 540 million years of climate history show the planet tumbling between icehouse and hothouse states, revealing how rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is. Some 4 billion ...

"Such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years' time is very unlikely to happen, because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Our species likes it cold. Homo sapiens evolved in — and still inhabits — one of Earth’s rare and fragile ice ages, periods distinguished not by an abundance of saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths ...

It is often referred to as " the last ice age " and is best known for hosting now-extinct megafauna, such as woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. But ...