What If UniverseOpen the simulatorIce age simulator
Slide the planet into an ice age and watch the ice sheets spread across North America and Europe while the sea drops and the land bridges appear.
Try it now: free, in your browser
From the last ice age to Snowball Earth
About 20,000 years ago, ice sheets kilometres thick covered Canada, northern Europe and parts of Asia, and the sea was about 120 metres lower. Push further and the ice keeps spreading toward the equator, until the whole planet freezes over in a Snowball Earth like the ones around 700 million years ago.
The simulator shows the ice line in Europe and North America, the lower sea and the people who live where the ice would be. The cold also cuts harvests across the world, and the famine that follows is counted with the other knock-on effects.
Questions
How cold was the last ice age?
About 6 °C colder than today on average, and much colder near the ice sheets.
How far south did the ice reach?
In North America to around 40° north, roughly where New York and Chicago are today; in Europe across the British Isles, northern Germany and Poland.
What is Snowball Earth?
Periods hundreds of millions of years ago when ice may have covered nearly the whole planet, oceans included.
All numbers in the simulator are rough estimates meant to show what could happen, not predictions.