Boring Facts About the Ice Age to Fall Asleep To

In this calm and deliberately boring episode, you'll listen to hundreds of quiet facts about the Ice Age, a long, slow chapter in the Earth's history when much of the world was colder than it is today and great sheets of ice spread quietly across the land over many thousands of years. We take a slow and unhurried look at what an ice age actually is and how it worked, since the world cooled gradually rather than all at once, enormous slabs of ice called glaciers built up and crept across the land, and they slowly shaped the hills, lakes, and valleys we still see around us. Along the way, we cover the animals that lived in the cold world, from woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses to reindeer and the great herds of the frozen plains, how ice ages come and go in long repeating cycles, why the Earth grows colder and warmer over vast spans of time, and how the ice slowly melted and reshaped the world as it went. There are many overlooked details, including how slowly a glacier actually moves, why so many ordinary landscapes were quietly carved by ice, how sea levels fell and land bridges appeared when so much water was locked up as ice, and how the last ice age ended only a few thousand years before written history began. Nothing here is dramatic, and nothing needs to be remembered. Tonight, as you listen, you can simply rest inside the thought that even the most ordinary subject contains more quiet details than anyone could ever notice at once.