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.

The Earth’s climate is a dynamic entity, continuously evolving over billions of years with alternating periods of extreme heat and cold. Recent scientific studies indicate that the Earth is subtly ...

A light microscope image of a planktonic foraminifera collected from the water in the Southwest Indian Ocean. (Photo by Tracy Aze, University of Leeds via Courthouse News) (CN) — Carbon is one of the ...

Sediments from Scotland hint that ocean-atmosphere interactions continued more than 600 million years ago despite widespread ice.

Global warming could eventually bring about a new ice age on Earth, aided by organic carbon buried in the deep ocean, ...

Even when Earth was locked in its most extreme deep freeze, the planet’s climate may not have been as silent and still as ...

Cosmic dust can tell scientists about how ice covered Earth during the last ice age. This dust is leftover debris from asteroids and comets... What space dust reveals about Earth's ice age Around ...

A cyanobacterial mat fragment sampled from the edge of a meltwater pond during a 2018 Antarctic expedition. (Roger Summons / MIT Summons Lab) (CN) — Scientists led by a team from the Massachusetts ...

Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, oceans from pole to pole were covered with a blanket of ice a ...

Computer simulation of Earth's climate evolving over one million years in response to a sudden release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. UC Riverside researchers have discovered a piece that was ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. How many ice ages has the Earth had, and could ...