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Ice Age

ICE
The book I chose to read is Frozen Earth: Explaining the Ice Age by R. V. Fodor, the associate Professor of Geology at North Carolina State University. It presents the recent discoveries and history of the ice age in an easy-understanding and accessible way. He first begins with a little background of ice ages. He then talks about glaciers and how they form and act. Then he talks about the different theories of how this happened. He concludes with speaking of the future and the climate it possesses.
Scientists have discovered that in the past million years, glaciers have covered the Earth's surface on several different occasions. There have been several "ice ages" in the Earth's past, and twenty thousand years ago was Earths most recently recorded. Large blankets of ice covered a large majority of land, forcing man and animals southward. Much of North America was under ice. Seven-thousand years ago the glaciers had melted off and that marked the end of it. Because of the glaciers being such ancient history it is hard for scientists to obtain and interpret data. The study of glaciers and the ice age is relatively new. In Switzerland around 1800, rocks attracted geologists in developing the first ideas of the ice ages. They wondered why large smooth boulders, called erratics, were lying out of place in fields and forests. Charles Lyell argued that icebergs had placed them there. Two other scientists stated that the boulders in the valley floors were similar to those found in the glaciers of the Alps. Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist, proved that ice could do this. He showed other scientists of places where large moving ice sheets had scratched and carved the surface of valley walls and floors. He was finally able to prove to the scientists that there had been an ice age. All of many doubts that ice sheets could occupy such large areas of land, were silenced after an expedition to Greenland in 1852. Furthermore, in the 1850s scientists...