The Ice Age

ISBN-13: 9783662645895 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 416 str.

Juergen Ehlers

Spis treści

1 Introduction: In the beginning was the Flood / Precambrian, Ordovician, Permo-Carboniferous - the Ice Ages of the Earth's History / Box: Ice Age in the Desert - Glacial Traces in Libya. 

2 The course of the ice age: Günz, Mindel, Riss, Würm - is the division still valid? / Milankovich and the consequences / Traces in the deep sea / The climate curve / The sequence of strata on the mainland has many gaps / When did the Quaternary begin?

3 Ice and water: Today's glaciers - from cirque glaciers to inland ice / Box: Deformable bedrock, impact glaciation? / Origin of glaciers / How does a glacier move? / Meltwater

4 Ground moraines and terminal moraines - the traces of glaciers: The ground moraine - a colorful mixture? / Long-distance transport - short-distance transport / Deposition of moraine material / Many investigation possibilities - but how independent are the results? / The dynamics of the ice sheets

5 From the glacial mill to the glacial valley: discharge behavior of today's glacial rivers / Traces of Pleistocene meltwater activity / Fjords, gullies, osses / Outwash plains and gravel terraces / Glacial valleys

6 Maps - where are we?: Maps and satellite images - basic data for ice age research / Projections and ellipsoids - the devil is in the details

7 How far did the glaciers reach?:  Europe - how far did the ice reach? / Barents Sea - the discovery of an ice sheet / Asia - the riddle of Tibet / North America - the ice ages are getting older / South America - volcanoes and glaciers / Africa, Australia, Oceania - where were there glaciers? And when? / Antarctica - eternal ice? / Attempt of an overview

8 Ice in the soil - the formation of periglacial areas: Today's permafrost / Periglacial formations / Weathering and leveling / Block glaciers - glaciers (almost) without ice / Strangulation and ground flow / Frost crevasses and ice wedges / Pingos, palsas and other frost bumps.

9 Hippos on the Thames - the history of warm periods: Vegetation development / Fauna evolution / Weathering and soil formation.

10 Process of deglaciation: ice disintegration / After the ice, the deluge - Lake Missoula and other ice reservoirs / The formation of sinks / Glacial scars and other traces of the last ice movement

11 Wind, sand and stones - the aeolian processes:  Dunes, drifting sand, loess / Water in the desert - the shifting of climatic zones / Changes in the rainforest / Traces of the periglacial climate. 

12 What happened to the rivers?:  Terraces, dry valleys, deltas - fluvial processes / The Rhine - influenced by Alpine and Nordic ice / The Elbe flowed to the Baltic Sea / The Siberian rivers and the largest lake on Earth.

13 North Sea and Baltic Sea - the history of marginal seas: The development of the North Sea / The formation of the North Sea / The formation of the coastal barrier with the islands / From ice reservoir to marginal sea - the development of the Baltic Sea

14 Man intervenes:  Human dispersal / Neanderthals / Postglacial development.

15 Climate reconstructions and models: Glaciation models / Models of oceanography / Climate models

16 Literature; Index

O autorze

Dr. Jürgen Ehlers is a German geoscientist. Together with Prof. Philip L. Gibbard, Cambridge, he has led the project 'Extent and Chronology of Quaternary Glaciations' for the International Union for Quaternary Research, involving 170 scientists from 50 countries. Gibbard and Ehlers are among the best experts on glacial geology and were awarded the Medal of Merit of the German Quaternary Association (DEUQUA). Ehlers is the author of several books on the Quaternary (Enke and Wiley) and on the North Sea (WBG) and is also known as an author of historical crime fiction.

Blurb

Nothing new from the Ice Age? Far from it! Barely ten years have passed since the first edition of this book was published, but in that time researchers around the world have developed new methods and published their findings in scientific journals. Consequently, ideas about the course of the Ice Age have changed dramatically. The sequence of the individual ice advances, the direction of ice movement and the direction of meltwater drainage are only partially known, but they can be reconstructed. This book offers in-depth information about the state of the investigations.

Ice ages are the periods of the earth's history in which at least one polar region is glaciated or covered by sea ice. Thus, we are currently living in an Ice Age. The present Ice Age is also the period in which humans started to intervene in the shaping of the earth. The results are obvious. Aerial and satellite images can be used to trace the melting of glaciers, but also the decay of the Arctic permafrost, and the clearing of the Brazilian rainforest.

This book is a translation of the original German 2^nd edition Das Eiszeitalter by Jürgen Ehlers, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature, in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and promotes technologies to support the authors.

The Author
Dr. Jürgen Ehlers is a German geoscientist. Together with Prof. Philip L. Gibbard, Cambridge, he has led the project 'Extent and Chronology of Quaternary Glaciations' for the International Union for Quaternary Research, involving 170 scientists from 50 countries. Gibbard and Ehlers are among the best experts on glacial geology and were awarded the Medal of Merit of the German Quaternary Association (DEUQUA). Ehlers is the author of several books on the Quaternary (Enke and Wiley) and on the North Sea (WBG) and is also known as an author of historical crime fiction.