ice age

[ahys eyj]

noun

Geology.

1. a geologic period during which ice thickly covers vast masses of land.

   astronomical phenomena related to the widespread glaciation of ice ages.

2. Ice Age, the most recent of the earth’s many ice ages, occurring during the Pleistocene Epoch.

   Our familiar continents were shaped quite differently before the Ice Age.

ice age

noun

1. another name for glacial period

ice age

1. Any of several cold periods during which glaciers covered much of the Earth.

2. Ice Age. The most recent glacial period, which occurred during the Pleistocene Epoch and ended about 10,000 years ago. During the Pleistocene Ice Age, great sheets of ice up to two miles thick covered most of Greenland, Canada, and the northern United States as well as northern Europe and Russia.

Word History and Origins

Origin of ice age¹

First recorded in 1870–75

Example Sentences

On the floors of many valleys and craters, swirling, grooved patterns reveal where icy material once moved during an earlier martian ice age.

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The glacier shed eight kilometers of ice in that short period, a pace comparable to the rapid withdrawals that marked the end of the last ice age.

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This revealed that, nearly 11,000 years ago, just after the last ice age, dog skulls started to change shape.

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"During the last ice age, there was almost no cosmic dust in the Arctic sediments," he said.

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In the 1970s, we were warned about a new ice age and in the 1980s of a nuclear winter.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal