The Earth goes through natural cooling and warming trends, not to be confused with man’s impact on climate. Ice Ages have occurred and waned. The pace of warming at the end of an ice age has been the subject of debate. It turns out that in Antarctica the pace of warming at the end of the last ice age was far from uniform.

West Antarctica began emerging from the last ice age about 22,000 years ago – well before other regions of Antarctica and the rest of the world, according to a team of scientists who analyzed a two-mile-long ice core, one of the deepest ever drilled in Antarctica.

Scientists say that changes in the amount of solar energy triggered the warming of West Antarctica and the subsequent release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Southern Ocean amplified the effect and resulted in warming on a global scale, eventually ending the ice age.