http://www.whaton.uwaterloo.ca/waton/f914.html
Thought this was a cool fact, I recently fell down a wiki hole looking at the geology of Ontario.
I was looking at the map u/LOGIEBEAR9 shared in his post and noticed two glaciers pushing fairly far south, that kinda surprised me. Knowing how the climate in Phandalin and Waterdeep was described, I thought it deserved a little more thought.
Now, cording to a Google search Waterdeep sits just above 45ยฐ North, but from eyeing that map scale that puts the city less than 600 miles from the northern edge of the map, and since Toril is comparable in size to Earth, that's only ~8ยฐ of latitude. That's putting the southern edge of those ice sheets at around 47-48ยฐ (again, just from eyeballing on a phone) which is well within what was been seen in the last glacial maximum as far as advancing ice sheets go.
I know that worldbuilders have enough to think about without getting bogged down in climatology, so I'm not expecting a categorical answer, but given the realms have almost a millennium and a half of recorded history (what came before the adoption of DR, by the way) and is gifted with exceptionally long lived sapient species and a close connection to nature and it's processes, it would be a really fascinating deep cut if on top of all the fantasy stuff some Elf or Dragon were to sit up and go "Ok, what the heck? It is *definitely* getting colder, *definitely* getting drier, and those glaciers are **for sure** closer than when I was a kid"
A magical world in a late medieval/early renaissance period setting developing alongside an ensuing glacial maximum! That is **JUICY!**
Doing a school project on Europe during the Pleistocene, and need info.
I keep hearing about hippos and ostriches that lived in Europe back then and get confused on if they lived on steppes or in some other interglacial ecosystem.
The next predicted glacial period is expected in roughly 50,000 years depending on human GHG emissions. By examining the last glacial period it's possible that most of North America and Europe will be completely covered in ice or permafrost, whilst the rest of Earth's landmasses will be reduced to harsh inhospitable environments. Is it conceivable that given 50,000 years humanity could advance enough to endure this event on Earth? Would all man-made artefacts in glacial regions be destroyed by glacial advance (albeit slowly)? Do you think that humans will achieve a type I civilisation by then, extending our reach to interstellar or even intergalactic areas of space? Might this event be our absolute deadline for becoming a spacefaring civilisation: colonising other planetary bodies, having orbital habitats, and exploring other solar systems? Of course, all of these questions assume we don't wipe ourselves out first via nuclear holocaust, plague, electromagnetic storms, or some other catastrophic disaster. I just want to hear people's opinions, I'm more of an optimist myself.
Human civilization began development around 12000 years ago with domestications of grains and animals in centers of origin, which in turn was because of the shifting climate after the Ice Age ended and the climate warmed. But humans have been around for 300,000 years, and there were interglacial periods hundreds of thousands of years ago that homo sapiens lived through, why didn't we domesticate plants and animals then and have a rise of civilizations like 12000 years ago?
I can't find the graph that I saw that claimed that temps during the last interglacial period (roughly 130,000 years ago) that temps rose over 2.5 degrees C globally. It's no conspiracy or secret that GHG rose during these periods which that tied to the sun did increase global temps, but they did fall over time (though not as fast as they rose.) How high did temps get during this time?
Reading through this wikipedia page on the Eemian it says that temps were 1-2 degrees higher than during the Holocene. Assuming this is referring to pre-industrial levels, then does that mean that current warming (at the moment and if we can sustain it to 2 degrees) is on par with the Eemian?
EDIT:
Please stop replying to this post as if I'm a denier. I'm not a climate denier. I understand that rapid warming is bad for the environment. I'm simply asking is if the Eemian period was really 1-2 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels.
