13 APRIL 2021
The last ice age persisted for over 100,000 years. An ice-bound eternity by any stretch of the imagination, but this long winter was not completely frozen into stillness.
During the Last Glacial Period, which ended approximately 12,000 years ago, climate change existed as a powerful phenomenon, much as it does now, albeit for different reasons.
Over the course of the ice age, a series of abrupt warming episodes punctuated the coldness, each of them sending temperatures soaring (by up to 16 degrees Celsius) in temporary heat waves that flared for decades before disappearing.
These sudden phenomena, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, took place dozens of times over the 100 millennia of the Last Glacial. But what was it that made them spark to life at all?