Lecture 21 Wild & Woolly: The Origins of the Quaternary Ice Age & Its Fauna скачать в хорошем качестве

Lecture 21 Wild & Woolly: The Origins of the Quaternary Ice Age & Its Fauna

How did the Quaternary Ice Age form? And from where did its characteristic assemblage of animals come? The Ice Age of the Quaternary (the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs of the last 2.6 million years) was one of the most recent events in Earth History, and one of the first ancient events to be discovered by geologists. Starting with the work of Louis Agassiz and colleagues in the mid-19th Century, a series of discoveries from land, from the deep sea, from mathematics, and from paleogeography revealed the existence of the advance and retreats of glaciers and ice sheets around the world. We we explore what the world was like in glacial maxima versus interglacials, and what drives those transitions. We also explore the animals and biomes associated with the cold regions of Eurasia during the Pleistocene, and what and where their ancestors were. We see how some came from the steppes and plains of Eurasia, but that several of them can trace ancestry to Earth's "Third Pole": the Tibetan Plateau. New discoveries there, in the Zanda Basin, show how Miocene mammals adapted to the cold mountain conditions, then moved out to the newly frigid lowlands during the Pleistocene.