Lesson 3.2: The Icy Epoch

This lesson brings you to an epoch when snow accumulations begin major ice ages. Advancing glaciers scour the continents and retreating glaciers litter the landscape with the debris of destruction. Giant mammoths and sabre-toothed cats populate Alberta. Sand dunes and mountain glaciers from this epoch remain to this day.

• Read pages 375 and 376 of the textbook.
  
  

In the next activity, you will use a computer animation to not only get a sense of a continental ice sheet, but to discover its amazingly fluid nature.

• Read page 377 of the textbook, starting with “Are We in an Ice Age Right Now?”
  
  

Ocean sediments and sedimentary rock layers store information about ancient times. Information is also recorded in naturally occurring ice sheets. In the next investigation you will use a spreadsheet to analyze data from an ice core. The ice core was extracted by drilling into the Antarctic ice sheet.

• Read pages 379 and 380 of the textbook, starting at “The Wisconsin Glaciation” and ending at the investigation. Answer the questions as you encounter them.
  
  Check your answers with those in the “Practice Answers” in the online course.
  
  

The water that you use as running water in your home may have been in “cold storage” for hundreds of years before it came to you. Find out more about the source of your drinking water in the next investigation.

 

• Read “3.2 Summary” on page 381 of the textbook. Then, complete “3.2 Questions”.
  
  Check your answers with those in the “Practice Answers” in the online course.
  

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Go to Assignment 3.2: The Icy Epoch.