Mapping the Last Ice Age

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the European landscape looked radically unrecognizable compared to today. Enormous ice sheets flattened Northern Europe, global sea levels dropped dramatically, and the sheer weight of the ice compressed Earth's crust downward by hundreds of meters.

Europe Under the Ice is an impressive interactive mapped visualization that tracks these massive geophysical changes step-by-step from 24,100 BC all the way to the present day. Press play on the map and you can watch the ice sheets spread and retreat across Northern Europe over the millennia.

The map makes these changes particularly fascinating because it shows not just the changing extent of the ice, but also how the underlying terrain of Europe has changed over the ages. You can watch ancient coastlines disappear and the modern shape of Europe emerge from the retreating ice. One of the most striking examples of this is Doggerland, the landmass that once connected Britain to mainland Europe. As sea levels rose, Doggerland was gradually submerged, transforming the geography of northern Europe.

The map uses a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection covering roughly 4,500 × 5,250 km. It combines modern terrain with modelled crustal differences, so the mountains shown are today's mountains at their Ice Age elevations, rather than a reconstruction of the actual landscape of 24,000 years ago. It is also important to note that this visualization focuses on the large-scale ice sheets and their effects on the Earth's crust rather than attempting to show every glacier and patch of mountain snow. Contemporary glaciers and mountain snow are therefore not visualized on the map.

Also See

IceMap - another animated map of the last Eurasian Ice Age.