For how long has Earth been having Ice Ages?

Question

I keep reading at various websites that Earth has been having periodic Ice Ages during the last several million years. But there is no mention of whether Ice Ages existed before that or not.

Does anybody know if Earth has been having periodic Ice ages 10 million years ago? Were there any Ice Ages 50 and 100 million years ago?

Answer 1

A great website to visit is http://www.scotese.com

Click on climate history and you can see how the climate has changed sine the Cambrian.

Of course, the further we go back in time, the sketchier the details are, but good climatologists know what they are doing.

This is an awesome site and you can see the cold versus the warm periods.

Answer 2

follow up on this link for your answer;  http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycle...

Answer 3

Depending on which sources you look at, there have been 5 to 7 major glaciations in the last million years or so.  Each one lasted roughly 100,000 years, during which massive glaciers extended from the poles to what are now temperate regions. Before that there isn't much direct evidence, but it is generally believed that the earth's climate has undergone many wild swings through its history, and there probably were more ice ages at earlier times.  One theory, called "snowball earth" claims that there was a monster Ice Age around 700 million years ago, when the earth was covered with snow and ice from poles to equator.  But there is a lot of controversy about this.