Early Ice Age and Beyond (Part Forty-Six)

At and around two million years ago, the first North American glacier started its southern advance. The ice age was now in the making, and this glacier consumed nearly one million years in its advanced from, and retreat back toward, the northern pressure centers. The central ice sheet extended south as far as Kansas; the eastern and western ice centers were not then so extensive. Well, fifteen million years ago, the first great glacier was retreating northward. In the meantime, enormous quantities of snow had been falling on Greenland and on the northeastern part of North America, and erelong this eastern ice mass began to flow southward. This was the second invasion of the ice. These first two ice invasions were not extensive in Eurasia. During these early epochs of the ice age North America was overrun with mastodons, woolly mammoths, horses, camels, deer, musk, oxen, bison, ground sloths, giant beavers, saber-toothed tigers, sloths as large as elephants, and many groups of the cat and dog families. But from this time forward they were rapidly reduced in numbers by the increasing cold of the glacial period. Toward the close of the ice age the majority of these animal species were extinct in North America. Away from the ice the land and water life of the world was little changed. Between the ice invasions the climate was about as mild as at present, perhaps a little warmer. The glaciers were, after all, local phenomena, though they spread out to cover enormous areas. The coastwise climate varied greatly between the times of glacial inaction and those times when enormous icebergs were sliding off the coast of Maine into the Atlantic, slipping out through Puget Sound, into the Pacific, and thundering down Norwegian fiords into the North Sea. (In Memory of Dad)rnQuote: Most men are like eggs, too full of themselves to hold anything else. Josh Billings Check out Ms. Oberne’s work, “The Birth of Jesus and Beyond.” FREE to READ available at these markets: https://books2read.com/u/31YAgr