Iceberg in the Arctic with its underside exposed as photographed by AWeith – Wikipedia “Iceberg” licensed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
TOP 10 ICE AGES / ICE AGE ICEBERG (SPECIAL MENTION)
Alright stop, collaborate, and listen – ice is back with a brand new invention.
There’s even more Ice Age iciness, with the usual twenty special mentions for my Top 10 Ice Ages.
As usual, these special mentions are, dare I say it, more of an Ice Ace iceberg, as I stretch the category of ice age well beyond any geological or scientific classification to all things ice or icy whether scientific, historic, cosmic or mythic – getting weirder and wilder the deeper I go…
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(1) IMPACT WINTER
“The hypothesized prolonged period of cold weather due to the impact of a large asteroid or comet on the Earth’s surface”.
Obviously, the immediate impact is very hot – at the point of impact. We’re talking the “enormous amount of dust, ash and other material” thrown up into the atmosphere from the impact and its aftermath (including firestorms or widespread fires from the impact), which then blocks out heat and light from the Sun, causing temperatures to drop dramatically.
Perhaps the most famous (and probable) impact winter is hypothesized as that from the “dino-buster” asteroid impact in the K-T extinction event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. And yes – I know it’s called K-Pg now but you’re going to need another one of those before you pry the name K-T from my cold, extinct hands.
(2) VOLCANIC WINTER
As for impact winter but this time the impact is coming from inside the Earth! That is, from “a reduction in global temperatures caused by droplets of sulfuric acid obscuring the Sun and raising Earth’s albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a large, sulfur-rich, particularly explosive volcanic eruption”.
There’s been quite a few of these – they are hypothesized to lie behind the Late Antique Little Ice Age and Little Ice Age, at least in part – but again perhaps the most famous was that from the Toba supervolcanic eruption 74,000 years ago, sometimes hypothesized as the Toba catastrophe event to have pushed humans to the brink of extinction reduced to potentially as few as 1,000 members of their species.
(3) FIMBULWINTER
In Norse mythology, the winter of the end of the world – the immediate prelude to Ragnarok.
“Fimbulwinter is three successive winters, when snow comes in from all directions, without any intervening summer. Innumerable wars follow.”
Apparently, the myth might originate in the volcanic winter of 536 AD (part of the Late Antique Little Ice Age) or even earlier climate change at the end of the Nordic Bronze Age.
More broadly, I use Fimbulwinter as representative of mythic winter – and winter in mythology or religion.
(4) FANTASY WINTER
Ice Ages or worlds of ice in fantasy & SF, including fantasy or SF set in the Ice Age or ice ages proper (although let’s face it, we’re talking the Pleistocene rather than any other ice age on our planet) – which are surprisingly prolific.
Narnia’s perpetual winter enchanted by the White Witch. Winter is coming in A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones – as well as the White Walkers as the embodiment of ice or an ice age.
Worlds of ice in SF, perhaps most famously Hoth in Star Wars – although my personal favorite remains Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air, where our own world is utterly frozen after it has become a rogue planet after being torn away from the Sun by a passing “dark star”.
(5) GENERAL WINTER
General winter sounds like a good term for an ice age but no – I’m referring to General Winter, the nickname given to the personification of winter as a factor in military history or war, typically as a defensive buffer or force multiplier and particularly in Russia.
Winter famously contributed “to military failures of several invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union” – perhaps most famously in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the Second World War, albeit often overstated for the latter with the common adage that Germany was defeated by the Russian winter.
Ironically, General Winter may be outranked in Russia or the Soviet Union by General Mud, albeit closely related, from the muddy season or “rasputitsa” of autumn rains and spring thaws – an irony best illustrated by the German armed forces initially welcoming the onset of winter in 1941 for ending the rasputitsa season.
More broadly, I use General Winter as representative of winter warfare or winter war, including the Winter War called as such between Finland and the Soviet Union, as well as the impact of winter or cold weather on military history in general. The infamous Crossing of the Rhine for the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire on 31 December in 406 AD – although that the Rhine was frozen, making the crossing easier, is a hypothesis.
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)
(6) SNOWBALL EARTH
Okay, this is something of a cheat as Snowball Earth is a hypothesis that during one or more of Earth’s glacial periods, the Earth’s surface was “nearly entire frozen with no liquid oceanic or surface water exposed to the atmosphere”. I just like the name so couldn’t resist it for its own entry in my Top 10 Ice Ages.
There’s a less frozen version proposed as Slushball Earth “with a thin equatorial band of open (or seasonally open) water”.
Usually proposed for the Sturtian glacial period in the Neoproterozoic Era, as well as the Marinoan glacial period – both aptly enough within the period in that era called Cryogenian.
(7) LATE ANTIQUE LITTLE ICE AGE
A cooling period in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, hypothesized as a “volcanic winter” (more about that in special mentions) coinciding with three large volcanic eruptions and contributing to the decline of the Roman Empire – contrasting with the Roman Warm Period. So the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was caused by…global cooling?
(8) LITTLE ICE AGE – GREAT FROST & YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER
A period of regional cooling, particulary in the North Atlantic, variously proposed from the 16th century (but also as early as 1300) to the 19th century (about 1850) with several causes proposed for it – contrasting with the Medieval Warm Period.
Within the Little Ice Age, there’s the Great Frost – for the winter of 1708-1709, the coldest European winter for the past 500 years.
Also within the Little Ice Age, albeit towards the tail end, there’s the Year Without a Summer in 1816 – which was exactly what it says on the tin with the coldest summer temperatures on record in Europe between 1766 and 2000, usually identified as a volcanic winter event from the eruption of Mount Tambora (located in modern Indonesia) in 1815.
(9) NUCLEAR WINTER
As for impact or volcanic winter but this time we do it, almost making you proud of human achievement – “the severe and prolonged global climactic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread urban firestorms following a large scale nuclear war”.
(10) BIG FREEZE & HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE
Yes, there’s an Ice Age for the entire universe – the Big Freeze or Heat Death of the Universe, “a scientific hypothesis regarding the ultimate fate of the universe” – with the universe approaching absolute zero (or alternatively maximum entropy) over a very long timescale (so long as to be almost eternity).
Speaking of absolute zero…
(11) ABSOLUTE ZERO
The ultimate Ice Age state of reality – and by ice, we’re talking the solid state of gases, not water. Water freezes to ice at 0 degrees Celsius – absolute zero is 0 degrees Kelvin or -217.15 degrees Celsius.
It’s also impossible – while absolute zero can be approached, it can never be reached, although modern science can come pretty damn close (in units of picokelvin or one trillionth of a kelvin).
(12) SPACE
We already live in a cosmic Ice Age so to speak – space, which has an average or baseline temperature only slightly above absolute zero at 2.7 degrees Kelvin, apparently from the background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. Talk about running on fumes!
However, the actual temperature of space can vary depending on neighboring bodies, obviously such as stars.
(13) ASTROPHYSICS ICE LINE
Even our immediate stellar environment – the solar system, albeit itself incomprehensibly vast compared to Earth – is mostly an ice age, outside the so-called ice line (or frost line or snow line) in astrophysics.
It always strikes me how narrow the sweet spot or temperate habitable zone around our Sun (or any star) is – with our planet’s orbit obviously in it and even then it gets ice. In fairness, Mars is also in it – as the only other such planet “where liquid water can exist on the surface”. Otherwise, the ice line kicks in at 5 astronomical units – 1 astronomical unit is the average distance of Earth from the Sun – from Jupiter onwards.
Speaking of ice lines (or snow lines or frost lines)…
(14) POLES & MOUNTAINS
The ice line in astrophysics is borrowed from the similar ice line on Earth itself – or rather ice lines, as the ice lines for both poles (north and south, Arctic and Antarctic) and for sufficiently high mountains which have the same effect (through their height to where our atmosphere is thinner).
And yes – the ice lines mark the parts of our planet that are in an ice age, or rather the areas of glaciation for our present ice age, while the rest of the planet is in an interglacial period of the ice age.
That’s essentially the defining characteristic of an ice age – that parts of the planet are in glaciation – sometimes stated as icehouse Earth, as opposed to greenhouse Earth for which there is no glaciation, as in other geological periods (and as the argument goes, increasingly for our own with global warming).
(15) POLAR DESERTS & OCEANS
It’s always fascinated me that those regions of the Earth that fall under an ice cap climate – where no monthly mean temperature exceeds 0 degrees Celsius – have rainfalls low enough to qualify as deserts, although they usually are distinguished from true deserts. Hence, most of the interior of Antarctica is polar desert and it is the driest continent on Earth, even more so than the usual suspect (and next driest continent) Australia. I would have thought that polar deserts are relatively more common during ice ages.
Equally, it’s always fascinated me that the biome of Antarctica is predominantly marine – while the continent itself is mostly dead, its seas and coastline. The same can be said of the Arctic proper, only more so as it is entirely marine – such that the polar bear is classified as a marine mammal.
For that matter, there’s the deep sea or 90% of the volume of the ocean – effectively a oceanic ice age of itself, with consistent temperature of 0-3 degrees Celsius.
X-TIER (WEIRD / WILD TIER)
(16) GREAT FLOOD
Or as it might be called, the Great Thaw.
After the ice comes the thaw. Flood or deluge myths – including that of Atlantis – are sometimes attributed to the rise of sea levels from melting glacial ice at the end of the Last Glacial Period about 11,700 years ago
(17) FROZEN UNDERWORLD – HEL & HELL
The eternal ice age!
It’s not surprising that the underworld of Norse mythology – Hel or Helheim – was depicted as cold or frozen.
What is more surprising is for the Hell we’re more familiar with from Christian belief and popular imagination to depicted as cold or frozen rather than the usual archetype of the fires of hell. For hell to be frozen seems an oxymoron – after all, it’s where we get idioms like it will be a cold day in hell or when hell freezes over (invoking impossibility) and people wanting ice water in hell.
And yet that is how Dante, in the Inferno part of his Divine Comedy, depicted the deepest level of hell, reserved for traitors as the worst sinners and including Satan himself.
Not sure if that’s related to the supernatural cold spots – often causing breath to frost – associated with ghosts or worse.
(18) WINTER
Now is the winter of our discontent.
The seasonal ice age we have every year – and as such used as a metaphor, usually with associations with such things as discontent or the end of life with old age or death.
Speaking of which…
(19) PERSONAL ICE AGE
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
It’s everyone’s personal ice age, where everything gets frozen over – old age and death, for example, or depression and dark periods in life for which there is some possibility of a thaw.
And speaking of which
(20) S€XUAL ICE AGE
Yes – it’s time for my usual kinky entry as my final or twentieth special mention where the subject permits. I wouldn’t have thought that the subject of ice ages would have been open to kink – or in this case an absence of kink – but I just can’t resist the common usage of frigid for lack of sexual response (particularly in women) for the wider connotations of one’s own private s€xual ice age for lack of activity or response.
