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When did the last ice age end?

When did the last ice age end?
About 11,700 years ago
The end of the Younger Dryas cold period

That date marks the start of the Holocene, the current epoch, and it is also roughly when agriculture began — which is not a coincidence. Technically we are in an interglacial period of an ice age that has not ended: an ice age is defined by the presence of permanent ice sheets, and Greenland and Antarctica still have them. The last glacial maximum, when the ice reached furthest, was about 20,000 years ago.

What
The end of the Younger Dryas cold period
When
About 11,700 years ago
Category
The natural world
Could this change?
Not in any foreseeable way. The event is closed.

The natural world

Question When
When did Vesuvius last erupt? March 1944
When did the last thylacine die? 7 September 1936
When did the last passenger pigeon die? 1 September 1914
When did the Earth's magnetic poles last reverse? About 780,000 years ago

This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When did the last ice age end?
About 11,700 years ago — The end of the Younger Dryas cold period.
What happened?
That date marks the start of the Holocene, the current epoch, and it is also roughly when agriculture began — which is not a coincidence. Technically we are in an interglacial period of an ice age that has not ended: an ice age is defined by the presence of permanent ice sheets, and Greenland and Antarctica still have them. The last glacial maximum, when the ice reached furthest, was about 20,000 years ago.

Related pages

Sources

  1. United States Geological Survey — USGS (Public domain (US Government))

How these figures are compiled and checked