At the moment it is estimated that 15,600,000 square kilometres of the land surface on earth is covered by ice all year round. That is 10.5 per cent of the world’s total land area.
This has not always been the case. No one knows for certain what happened to the earth’s climate tens of thousands of years ago. But as recently as 10,000 years ago it is likely that the earth was coming out of an ice age. The planet’s weather had been so cold for so long that most of northern Europe looked the same as Antarctica does today. In the UK ice sheets spread as far south as the River Thames, and the sites of lots of the main cities of northern Europe like Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm were buried under hundreds of metres of ice. No wonder the mammoths that wandered over northern Europe at that time needed warm woolly coats.
Picture Credit : Google
