Explore The Ice Age!: With 25 Great Projects

By Cindy Blobaum and Bryan Stone

Brrr…does it feel cold? Get out your gloves and get ready to experience the Ice Age!

In Explore the Ice Age! with 25 Projects, readers ages 7-10 discover what an ice age consists of, why we have them, and what effect an ice age has on living organisms and ecosystems, paying particular attention to the most recent Ice Age, which is the only one humans were around to witness.

About 12,000 years ago, glaciers up to 2 miles tall covered up to one-third of Earth’s land! Explore how these moving mountains of ice changed almost everything on Earth, including shorelines, weather, plants, animals and human activities, migration, and more. Learn the science and techniques of archeological and paleontological digs to understand how we know so much about a time that happened before recorded history.

Science-minded activities lead readers to discover what a world covered in ice means for the earth’s crust, its atmosphere, and what happens when the planet begins to warm and the ice melts. Projects include creating mini glaciers to move mountains and create beaches and recreating the lifestyles of Paleolithic people to discover what they ate, how they hunted, how they made tools and clothes and their history in art. Don’t wait for the next ice age to get started!

Cartoon illustrations, fun facts, and a compelling narrative make Explore the Ice Age! an essential part of any STEM library.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nomad Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781619305793

Cindy Blobaum

Cindy Blobaum is the author of many nonfiction books for children, including Skulls and Skeeltons! and Explore the Ice Age! for Nomad Press. She is a contributor to Highlights, Hopscotch for Girls, and Plays magazines and has designed science-based programs and teacher workshops for nature organizations throughout the United States. Cindylives in Iowa.

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Nomad Press

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Copyright © 2017 by Nomad Press. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from

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The trademark Nomad Press and the Nomad Press logo are trademarks of Nomad Communications, Inc.

ISBN Softcover: 978-1-61930-581-6

ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-61930-577-9

Educational Consultant, Marla Conn

Questions regarding the ordering of this book should be addressed to

Nomad Press

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www.nomadpress.net

CONTENTS

Timeline

Introduction

Welcome to the Ice Age!

Chapter 1

What a World!

Chapter 2

Discovering the Ice Age

Chapter 3

Mammoths and More

Chapter 4

Paleo People

Chapter 5

Ice Age Again?

Essential Questions

Index

Interested in primary sources? Look for this icon.

Use a smartphone or tablet app to scan the QR code and explore more! You can find a list of URLs on the Resources page.

If the QR code doesn’t work, try searching the Internet with the Keyword Prompts to find other helpful sources.

KEYWORD PROMPTS

TIMELINE

C. 20,000 BCE:

Glacial ice reaches its! maximum size in the most recent ice age.

C. 9600 BCE:

The most recent ice age ends.

C. 50 BCE:

Roman poet Titusl Lucretius Carus writes about the human use of stones and sticks as tools.

1300–1850:

The world experiences what is often called the Little Ice Age, which isn’t a true ice age but consists of periods of cold temperature broken up by warmer times.

1739 CE:

French-Canadian soldier Charles LeMoyne becomes the first known European to see hundreds of Ice Age fossil bones in what is now known as Big Bone Lick in Kentucky.

1771:

Johann Esper finds bear and lion bones and human bones in a cave in the Jura Mountains in southwestern Germany.

1788:

One of the first fossil specimen of the giant ground sloth is found in Argentina.

1796:

Georges Cuvier, a French scientist, gives one speech about mammoths being extinct relatives of elephants and another speech about giant sloths being extinct relatives of smaller sloths. He becomes known as the Father of Paleontology.

1833:

Two pieces of etched antlers are found in France.

1837:

Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz presents his theory of a great ice age to a group of geologists. He becomes known as the Father of the Ice Age.

1879:

Cave paintings are discovered in the Altamira cave in northern Spain.

1901:

The owners of the La Brea Tar Pits in California let paleontologists remove bones from the area.

JULY 1977:

A Siberian miner uncovers Dima, a frozen baby mammoth, while bulldozing a patch of freshly thawed ground.

MAY 2007:

Lyuba, an entire mummified baby mammoth, is found along the northern coast in Russia by a Nenets reindeer herder and his sons.

2009:

A herd of pigs foraging for food in Scotland unearths a set of 12,000-year-old Ice Age stone tools.

2015:

A perfectly preserved mummified puppy is found in Siberian permafrost. The puppy is thought to have died in a landslide near a river.

2016:

Spanish scientists publish the first evidence that early humans hunted cave lions and used their pelts to cover huts used for important rituals.

JULY 2017:

The perfectly preserved bodies of a Swiss couple who went missing 75 years earlier are found on a shrinking glacier in Switzerland.

INTRODUCTION

WELCOME TO THE ICE AGE!

Imagine being alive around 12,000 years ago. Icy glaciers that were more than a mile tall inched their way across much of the earth. Giant hairy mammoths roamed the land. Fierce saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears prowled in search of food.

WORDS TO KNOW

glacier: a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface.

shelter: a place to live that protects a person from the weather.

Ice Age: a period of time when glaciers covered a large part of the earth.

Stone Age people worked together to find food, make shelters, invent tools, paint caves, and explore new places. Welcome to the end of the Ice Age, when the world was colder, many animals were bigger, and life was harder than it is today.

Even though humans were alive during the Ice Age, they couldn’t take photos, write books, or make videos of their lives. They didn’t have the right tools! As the earth warmed up and life changed, people forgot the way things used to be.

People made up stories to explain the strange things they found around them. People who lived in Greece found giant mammoth skulls with holes in the middle. Since they had never seen a mammoth, they said the skulls were from one-eyed monsters called cyclops.

People in Germany found skulls with big teeth and thought they were from dragons. In Denmark, old stories said huge, strange rocks found in the middle of fields were thrown there by giants. Other groups have said the huge rocks were dropped in fields by aliens or floods.

DID YOU KNOW?