Birth of Britain 2of3 Ice Age

I love this landscape all around me is the results of millions of years of movements of the Earth's crust volcanoes and colliding continents these are the forces they shaped Britain but there's another force that has had perhaps the greatest effect on the landscape we see around us today ice during the last ice age most of Britain would have been covered with a great sheet of ice up to a mile thick to find out how that would have affected the landscape I'm gonna journeying from north to south following the path of the unstoppable ice as it ground and bulldozed its way across the country 20,000 years ago Britain was in the grip of an ice age huge glaciers and ice sheets up to a mile thick covered the land all this ice had a dramatic effect on the landscape we see around us today from the highlands of Scotland to the South of England nowhere was left unaffected by Britain's Ice Age and the best place to see the immense power of all that ice is here a vast body of water that runs through the highlands for over 22 miles this is Loch Ness famous of course for the eerie monster that's supposed to lurk in its depths but there's something at the bottom of this lake that the geologists get much more excited about and the man who knows perhaps more than anyone what's going on deep beneath the Loch surface is Adrian shine Adrian first came to Loch Ness in 1973 to hunt for the Loch Ness monster he wanted to discover if there was any logical explanation for the hundreds of reported sightings attributed to the mythical beast so he searched the depths in his homemade sub even scan the entire lock using a fleet of boats equipped with the latest sonar equipment but to date he's found nothing no surprises there so in recent years he started researching what I thinks are far greater mystery how Loch Ness became so impossibly deep the first thing that you notice is you're driving towards the Loch is how incredibly big it is it is it's it's 22 and 3/4 miles long but it's the volume that's the important thing it's got more water in it than the whole of England and Wales put together you see the monster in it I've seen things that have interested me sometimes I've been able to explain them sometimes not but the depth is the thing which is what you've been working on absolutely and I'll show you now on our echo sounder adrienne's monster seeking hardware is now being used to plumb the incredible depths of the law this is our echo sound oh it's a bit like a radar but uses sound underwater we're sending a pin down and we're getting up on back and we're registering at 57 feet at the moment and look how close to the shore we are it's extraordinary so the lake does get deep very quickly it's very quickly indeed we're going to go across the Loch away from the shoreline and we're going to follow that steep slope all the way down to the bottom you see how regular the slope is yeah it's just falling away so what we're seeing here is this the shape of the sides of the Loch as it's moving towards the bottom yes yes we're just reaching the bottom now and you see that dead straight line entering at the bottom of the trace there yeah that is the flat silt bed the ping-pong sonar reveals the locked secret an incredibly steep u-shaped valley and that the lock is over 750 feet deep that's more than twice the depth of England's deepest lake West water but what's truly remarkable is that the floor of the Loch is 700 feet below sea level water on its own couldn't have cut this valley so far below the level of the sea it must have been a greater force to find out Adrian and his team drilled into the lake bed to take core samples the brown gunk in these cores is layer after layer of sediment that settled at the bottom of the lock for the past 10,000 years but it's the layer immediately underneath the muddy sediments that's the key where's the bottom of the lake bottom of the lake is about here and then we've got one two three four meters of this very organic dark brown traveling back in time traveling back in time layer by layer and then you've got this sudden interface this sterile blue grey glacial clay which is evidence of the glacier that took away the rock so that's the secret lockness was once filled by an enormous powerful glacier the top layers of mud were turned brown by rotting plants and animals but during the last ice age this was a barren lifeless place what the glacier left behind was a thick lifeless layer of blue grey clay made of ground-up rock so we know that it was a glaze here that actually gouged out this valley and made it the show yes we do and the division was so abrupt you could almost say that's the morning the Ice Age ended so Loch Ness was filled with a giant glass ear a vast flowing river of ice and carved out this immense line with the end of the Ice Age the glacier gradually melted and the law filled with water so if ever there was a monster in that lock it was a monstrous great glass here and given how deep the lock is I'd assumed that the glass here would have to have been about 750 feet high but I was wrong it was actually much much higher Adrian's about to show me clues the reveal just how high this glassier reached even though it's over ten thousand years since the last glacier melted here it's still possible to see the evidence it left behind hello Ellie 1,200 feet I felt every one of those who did why don't you take a rest against that rock well I guess the wrong it's a rocking stone you're kidding Alex this stone of the rocking if you're a McDonald by the way you should avoid it cuz it's meant to fall on you go on you've pushed I don't think I'm gonna look Donald this really rocks it really does oh hey a few tons there how long's this been up here like this probably about ten thousand years well since the ice melted anyway because the ice heads who have put it here I'm afraid not falling out of the sky has it no there's nowhere high enough for it to roll down from and so that is clear evidence of the ice leaving it here so why does he move well it's because the ice has let it down ever so gently exactly on its balance point on its fulcrum heavy rock now looking at this view you can really see that Loch Ness isn't just a lake it actually was once this huge long valley that was carved out by a massive glacier if you imagine that Lake full of ice ice all the way up to here and probably 2,000 feet above us gives you something to think about yeah this entire valley was filled by a truly massive glacier and its peak it would have been over a mile thick a white equivalent to more than 10 double-decker buses would have pushed down on every square foot of the valley floor it's this grinding power that dug the lock to such incredible depths and the fact that it's below sea level would have been no problem for the ice because ice unlike water can flow uphill pushed forward by the bulk of the glacier behind it the immense power of ice has left its mark not just at Loch Ness but all over the highlands of Scotland creating what I think is some of the most gorgeous scenery anywhere on the planet this is glencoe site of the infamous Glencoe massacre where members of the McDonald's clan were slaughtered in their beds by forces loyal to the English King but it's also got this fantastic u-shaped valley if you drained Loch Ness it would probably look just like that you see how a great lumbering glassier would have moved through it grinding down the base giving it this flat bottom on these very very steep sides but this is just one of hundreds of glen's and valleys across the whole of Britain that have been forged by mile after mile of glaciers and ice sheets to get to grips with just how much ice we're talking about I'm taking to the skies that down there is Loch Lomond and you really see the power of the ice high ground out this whole Lake during the Ice Age there would have been ice all the way from the bottom of the lock to the top of the mountain that's over a mile you can see there how the ice is scooped out the side of the top of Ben Lomond it's extraordinary to think that the ice got up this high so high that it was covering a whole mountain it's clear from up here that nowhere was left unaffected by the ice that blanketed the nation but what caused such a massive change in the climate to make it this cold where did all the ice come from ice has carved out the rugged landscape of the highlands of Scotland and by all accounts there was lots of it a blanket of ice up to a mile thick that covered the whole of northern Britain now that's what I call a change in the weather today climate change is headline news but the truth is we've known for hundreds of years that the climate is constantly changing and sometimes it gets very very cold and the amazing story of how we first realized we'd once been in the grip of an endless ferocious winter started with a mystery right here in the heart of the scottish highlands the sight of that mystery is the remote valley of Glenroy running around the edge of the glen there are three strange parallel lines you for almost 200 years scientists have been trying to unlock the secrets held in these strange markings local geologist Christina Bell continues to study these lines that are known locally as the parallel roads christina these are called roads and they'll all light roads but they're not actually roads are they no they're not rules at all it's very misleading name for them what did people think they were in the old days there's various myths and legends about what these actual features are on the hillside some people attributed them to fairies usually quit magical things but in 1840 Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz came to Glenroy in search of a more logical explanation he'd studied glasses in Switzerland and believed he could spot the same features right here in Scotland he was like no these are not marine this has been formed by a glacier sitting right here and damming a lake right here where we are now yeah so you'd have had a big glacier here and then all that would have been late yeah and these are lakeshore lanes it was a glassier that dammed the valley causing a lake to form as the climate cooled the glacier grew changing the depth of the lake creating the three distinct shorelines that can still be seen today the only way the parallel roads could have been made was if the valley was dammed by a glacier there the proof that Louie Agassiz needed to establish the British Ice Age so it was here at Glen Roy that scientists got this crucial piece of information to tell us that the Earth's climate isn't always the same that Britain had once been in the grip of a terrible Ice Age that it had been covered in glaciers and ice sheets Agassiz came up with his ideas about the ice ages over a hundred and fifty years ago and the arguments about what caused such a radical change in the climate of rage ever since the most widely accepted theory comes perhaps unexpectedly from the world of astronomy ice ages seem to coincide with very subtle changes in the orbit of the earth around the Sun every 100,000 years the Earth's orbit becomes slightly elongated making summers shorter and cooler winter snow fails to melt an ice age begins this cycle of warm and cold has been repeated at least 15 times over the past two million years every time the climate cooled Britain was turned into an icy wilderness as the last ice age took hold temperatures dropped and the ice grew flowing down from the mountains in great sheets that marched across the lower lying lands to the south and I'm following the course of that ice to Scotland's biggest city Glasgow is built on land which bore the full brunt of an ice sheet that was over a mile thick as a result there's something quite strange happening here Glasgow is one of my favourite cities in the whole of the UK it's got this really buzzy nightlife really good art scene and of course it's only just down the road from some of the most fabulous scenery in the whole of the world but I bet there's one thing you didn't know about Glasgow the whole city is rising at the rate of around about two millimeters a year there's so much ice on top of Scotland and Northern England during the Ice Age that its weight pushed the Earth's crust down and then when the ice started melting the crust began to bounce back again and it's still bouncing back in fact since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago parts of Scotland have risen by more than a hundred feet but the great mass of ice that flowed over this place had another more visible effect its way at times this great city looks more like San Francisco than Glasgow although you probably don't give it a second thought the effects of the ice age everywhere has anyone who lives around here will tell you they ride a bike the city is far from flat and that's because of the ice to find out how ice created these steep hills I've come to the city's ancient University apparently all the answers are to be found behind door 657 a look this is it 657 a loo this 225 steps to top rate so after cycling up the steepest hill in Glasgow and climbing 225 steps I'm really hoping the glaciologist Chris Clark can explain where all these hills have come from these hills you've been looking at they're called drumlins and now let's have a look at one there's one over here look see this hill oh the rather swanky Victorian things yeah that's it those posh ones on top of the hill and in the green flanks coming down that's not just any ordinary hills especially it's a drumlin and was that made by glaciation yeah exactly yeah the ice flowing across here made this bump that we call a drumlin and the Victorians hijacked it for a bit of status so underneath the Victorian grandeur lies a very special streamlined hill a drumlin created by a gigantic flow of ice that engulfed the city during the last ice age remember the cities built on making it harder us to see them this is an idealized let's look at some if we go down here goodness Murray look what's down here well I never so in this sandbox here yeah with a city stripped away we can see these hills called drumlins and we got to imagine the ice maybe a kilometer thick was bulldozing and plowing its way across this landscape and you might in a more boring world expect it to just plain a little plain all the dirt away you end up with a flat box but what I think is quite miraculous is as the ice was flowing these blister-like landforms grow and have this neat pattern so why did the ice act like this the ice sheet that passed over Glasgow was so heavy the ground started to behave like soft sand on a beach under the ice great ripples started to appear and then quite mysteriously these regular egg-shaped Hills began to form so where's that on the ground well let's take a look let's take this and try and match it to the landscape we looked at there the drumlin there with the houses on top we will look at this upstream end yeah ice was coming in this direction and then now that's not here yet is this one here with a flagpole on so that's so the y-direction yeah so it's looking longer which because we're looking at the side like that yeah Chris tells me that Glasgow sits on some a hundred and eighty drumlins that were all molded during the last ice age see this for distance the that's snow-covered peak yeah that's Loch Lomond side up no so that's where the glassier came from yeah exactly came down through that gap swept down past those Terra blocks and then swept around across the university here and whilst it was doing it created all these wonderful blister-like landforms that now Glasgow is built up let's put the egg back now you do have some remarkably neat pigeons in Glasgow Dhoni as you may have already guessed chris is mildly obsessed with drumlins he's not just been drumlin spotting in Glasgow he's running a project to plot the position of every single drumlin in the British Isles ireally idea how many there are in Britain there's over 65,000 you've mapped everyone we've mapped them all this incredibly detailed map not only shows the location of Britain's drumlins but also the directions they point and this can be used to work out how the ice was flowing so glaciologists can reconstruct how ice sheets grew and shrank back during different stages of the last ice age we've got the physics of how ice works and we have what climate if we press the button off it goes we have an ice sheet to begin with it's getting colder so the ice sheet grows starts off in Scotland and it expands out ice also develops over England and Wales and we end up with a large ice sheet so your people produce a mathematical model about how an ice sheet my evan flow but actually you can check that by looking at the drumlins outside to see what happened in the past yeahbsolutely as a nice way of putting it is this any more than an interesting intellectual exercise though yes it is because and if many people at the moment scientists politicians people are wondering what's going to happen to Antarctic ice sheets and the Greenland ice sheet in a warming world you know it's an important thing to to make a prediction remember it raises sea level this British Irish ice sheet when it melted it raise sea level by two and a half meters we know that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could raise sea level by twice one way of assessing the future of the world's two remaining ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland is to look back at the events of Britain's last ice age Chris's obsession with these unassuming little drumlin Hills could help us all plan for a future where climate changes once again coming up his really useful because everything that Chris said starts to come together you can see ben lomond over there with the highlands behind it and see how the glacier moves all the way down here right over to Glasgow the ice actually created this whole landscape and for me it's only when I start to understand this that I can really begin to connect with it and that's something that's quite special these enormous ice sheets kept on moving south and there they had an even more powerful effect in fact if it wasn't for the ice ages we wouldn't have the White Cliffs in Dover and Britain would still be part of France ice has certainly made a dramatic impact on the landscape of Scotland carving out deep Glen's locks and towering Peaks but across the border in England ice made its mark to the story of ice in England begins here amongst the majestic peaks of the Lake District I'm hiking with glaciologist Pete nee now up to be water a small lake and judging by the foul weather we're about to enter another Ice Age lis water sits in an amphitheatre shaped bowl called a quarry it's a classic Glacial feature and at 200 feet it's incredibly deep you could throw the whole of Nelson's column in there and still have space to spare both the climbers their serviettes yeah this must be one of the most beautiful landscapes in Britain throughout my trip I've seen the effects of glasses and I'm curious to know how the glasses themselves were created glasses formed basically where snow accumulates so so where we are here and we can see up sort of blue water behind him there and the back wall of this what's termed a quarry climate got cooler you start getting more snowfall snow blows off the plateau and into this into this quarry and as the snow builds up over time if it doesn't melt in a summer it builds up and gradually turns to ice and once it's turned to ice then it can start to flow downhill like a sort of a stiff porridge and and that's what a glacier is it's a body of ice that flows downhill under gravity how does it grab the rock which it uses to gouge out the valley so what it does is that as its flowing sliding slipping at the bottom and that slipping process is grinding the bedrock underneath and water at the bed of the glassy would be percolating down into the cracks and then refreezing and fractures or plucks the rock so glassy has not only grind away at rocks they also split pluck and rip out huge boulders what happens to all the rock that it grinds away so what happens is as it picks up the rock and it starts flowing down Valley it transports the material down Valley and then it you know it dumps it at some point being further further downstream and then as grasses retreat they leave material at their saw the furthest limit and then as they gradually work their way back up the valley you're left with what we can see here is a series of Marines on the on the left-hand side here these these are humps yeah they're basically lines of debris of the material carried by the glacier and you can see you've actually got sequential lines and what they represent are the retreating margin of the ice sheet it is extraordinary you can actually see where the glacier was all around this landscape by drawing a line from the Marines at the base and sides of the glassier to the quarry at the head of the valley it's possible to work out exactly where the glassier once sat classes like nature's bulldozers they gouge and rip out the rock at the top of the valley transport it all the way down to the bottom and then leave it in piles but Britain's last ice age wasn't just formed by a few glaciers it was formed by great ice sheets as temperatures dropped the glaciers grew eventually joining up to form vast blocks of ice these ice sheets then flowed out across the lower lying land pushed by the great weight of ice and snow that built up in the mountains in fact if you're watching this anywhere from Glasgow to Birmingham 20,000 years ago where you're sitting now would have been under a sheet of ice that was in places over a mile thick to get an idea of the power of that ice sheet Pete's going to show me something a bit further to the south of here we're driving just 50 miles and crossing into Yorkshire God's country as the locals would have you believe our destination is just outside a little village called ostrich in the dales the grassy hillside strewn with strange boulders at first glance these rocks look like any other scatter of boulders on a hillside but when you examine them a bit more closely a puzzle begins to emerge they're not actually from here at all there has got to be one of the most extraordinary stones ever seen it's not something out of Alice in Wonderland yeah they're cool glacial erratics Iran yeah and what they are is they're rocks that have been brought here by her glassier how did it end up perched on those little bit of rock there well what's happened is the the rock underneath has become eroded over the last fifteen thousand sixteen thousand years and you get left with this what's termed a pedestal and this is left basically standing a 30 40 centimeters above the local rock so because that rock is often this rock all that's eroded away yeah but it's where these giant rocks come from that gives geologists a clue about exactly what kind of ice brought them here Jesus has always been a cluster of rocks or is it more likely to have been one big rock the fraction over time I suspect it probably was one big rock and it's too broken up and by frost action into a number of different pieces but you'd have to really reconstruct it like a jigsaw to be certain of that but what is really clear is you know the largest bit is absolutely enormous and there's no way that this could have been brought here by I'm either rolling down the slope or by rivers presumably where it comes from is higher than this no not in this case we know from the type of geology that this is made out on the type of rock that the the rock came from a lower elevation so down in the valley and then the ice has flowed this way and as it's flowed uphill it's actually transported material of this size up the knot the hill so it carried this two miles uphill when it's go at about 100 meters yeah two miles uphill 100 meters vertically so you need a lot of power to do that so this is so much ice that it actually ignores the topography it just goes where it wants to yeah no I mean it you can look at glasses today in ice shoots today the sight of material they move is enormous you could dump a bus on on a glassy or an ice sheet and it move it without any trouble at all and this is a much heavier thing than a than a bus you this field of rocks is evidence that a vast ice sheet once flowed across this landscape is one of several that have advanced and retreated across Britain over the last two and a half million years but which one went further south and where did it stop the peak of the last ice age was about 20,000 years ago ice sheets flowed from the mountains down to a line that today runs from Grimsby in the east diagonally down through Darby and Birmingham ending in Gloucester and Cardiff to the West by pure coincidence this follows the line that economists and politicians call the north/south divide and back then it really was grim up north but this ice age wasn't the worst to hit Britain 450,000 years ago temperatures dropped even further creating the biggest Ice Sheet of them all known as the Anglian Ice Sheet this ice sheet would have a dramatic effect on the whole of Britain but most especially it played a crucial role in creating the landscape of our capital city London the bright lights beckon but no I ended up in Hornchurch acquired dormitory suburb five miles north of the Thames and guess what it's raining again I thought I knew this area pretty well I was brought up not far from here in fact my aunt Ethel used to live right down that road but I never ever imagined that thousands of years ago this leafy suburb had been covered by a vast blanket of ice the evidence for this wintery past was found when the Romford to Upminster line was dug in 1892 the railway embankment tells an incredible story of London's past and dannielle Shrieve is getting stuck in to find the evidence for me Danielle this looks to me just like muddy steps out the side of a railway embankment but you're gonna tell me it's more significant than that onion it is indeed because what we have here is evidence for my subtly reaching glaciation anywhere in Britain what's the evidence can you see that line there there's a very clear junction between this brown grey sticky clay below and the orange sandy gravels of the River Thames above yeah that's really clear what it's telling us is that a glazier moved into this part of Britain and in fact if I dig out a chunk you'll see exactly what I mean you see these chalky pellets here yeah there's no chalk in the local geology so in fact what this glass here has done is to rip up bits of chalk from the area of East Anglia there's also small fossils in there that tell us that the glass has moved over the area of the wash and the fens and there are larger chunks of chalk as well you can see a flattened surface where the glacier has moved this chalk along where as if it had been in a river rather than in ice it would have tumbled and been more rounded yeah that's right what was the effect of the glace around here really dramatic in fact prior to the glassy are coming to into the area the terms ran much further to the north really so the temps hasn't always been here that's extraordinary isn't it because we think of the Thames as being one of the most immoral things in southern England it's moved around a lot in the past and in fact the most dramatic occurrence was when this glassier arrived it caused the Thames to pond up against the ice sheet creating these massive ice dammed Lakes so the Thames used to flow much further to the north reaching the sea somewhere near Clapton in Essex and instead of henley-on-thames back then it would have been shells furred on Thames but when the Anglian Ice Sheet moved south it blocked the course of the river forming large lakes eventually the lakes burst their banks causing the Thames to take the more southerly course we see today but this isn't quite as far as the glacier got is it no if you go just to the top of the hill you can see the church and that's the point where the glossiest stopped finally the end of the line Feist in Britain comes into view this part at snan drusen horne church has been identified by geologists as the southernmost point of the ice sheet in mainland Britain thousands of years ago this would have been the edge of a vast ice sheet that extended from here right the way to the North Pole as this great ice sheet began to melt the giant Thames Lakes grew rapidly eventually they started to flood a huge torrent of water tore through a line of Lowe chalk hills to the south creating the White Cliffs of Dover and severing our last remaining link with continental Europe the English channel was created and for the first time Britain became an island so it was ice that changed the course of the mighty Thames and it was the ending of that Ice Age that cut Britain adrift from the continent but ancient climate change didn't just make us an island it had another extraordinary trick up its sleeve the necks curved Asians just a few miles downriver from here are about to reveal Britain's deep freeze had a dramatic effect on the land we see around us today but in the past it wasn't only really cold it also got really hot and some of the most dramatic evidence for ancient global warming has been found right here on our doorstep close to the Thames in East London welcome to historic path legs and a back end of a distribution warehouse with the Darfur crossing of the m25 in the background but beneath this industrial wasteland lies evidence of a very different past paleontologist Danielle Shrieve is leading me through the bushes to a snapshot in time that shows what happened to the British climate 300,000 years ago all these different colored layers it's like one of those little glass lighthouses that you get the seaside what do they all tell us it's an amazing story here and we're still in the River Thames but we're a hundred thousand years later than what we saw at Hornchurch and went out purfles we're now Purfleet and we've got a succession of deposits almost like a sandwich of cold then interglacial or warm climate and then cold climate deposits at the top but this isn't the same time as the Ice Age that we were looking at up at the railway line no we're a whole cycle later so a hundred thousand years later above the layers that were laid down during the Ice Age lies an orange sandy layer chock-full of shells these distinctive sediments were made by the ancient Thames when the world was a very different place this is extraordinary how old is this this is about three hundred thousand years old it's amazing isn't it just I don't don't have ever seen so many old shells in one place it's absolutely chock-full of shells and most of these are freshwater mussels they indicate a big lowland River with water depths of about five meters a substantial body of water have you found anything here apart from shells yes as you'd expect for a big river there's lots and lots of bones of fish but also some interesting animals that were living alongside the banks yeah so some of the things that we've got are these little fellows here this is a monkey's finger Bank oh it's great this is a macaque monkey so the same species that we find living in Gibraltar today these were really aggressive little nuisances these they were around in Britain yeah so the other things that we've got ah fossilized spotted hyena dropping oh come on how do you know this is spotted hyena well it's partly the shape but also because it's full of bone cuz the hyenas crunched down the bone and then this is what allows the droppings to fossilized if you've got monkeys and hyenas here it must have been really hot wasn't it well in fact although summer temperatures were about five degrees warmer um it was completely normal to have these animals living here elephants rhinos horses cattle all of them living quite happily in Britain how long did this hot period last about ten thousand years um after which we start to see the climate deteriorating so as the climate cooled over thousands of years the monkeys and hyenas scampered back to Africa and a new ice age began but sure enough regular as clockwork all about a hundred thousand years later that ice age ended and warmer climes returned to sunny East London the evidence for this period of balmy weather was found as an equally glamorous location roadworks on the side of the a13 Danielle and her team were given just two weeks to excavate the site before the bulldozers moved in what they discovered was truly remarkable some massive bones see partly in fact these are all parts of an extinct narrow nosed rhinoceros we've got shoulder blade and a massive rib so it gives you some idea of the size of the ribcage of this animal what's the scoop well that's a really chunky bone which is the bottom part of the upper arm over here we've got remains of wild horse here we've got part of a complete skeleton of an Oryx the ancestral wild cattle and hunting these animals a massive predator we have remains of lion and this is an animal that's 1/3 larger in size than the modern African species so we've seen three different sides here but the story seems to be similar in each one you get intense cold warmth heat then back to cold again absolutely and in fact in contrast to what we have at Purfleet instead of a densely forested environment we've now gone open savanna light grassland this is London's famous Leicester Square and right over here this pinkish building that's the Hippodrome Theatre where in the early years of the 20th century they had successful shows featuring wild African beasts but what the excited audiences in those days can possibly have realized was that under their feet there were the bones of hippos and giant lions which in the days before the last ice age used to prowl around on this very spot no doubt looking for take away the finds made across the UK point to a regular cycle of warm spells followed by long ice ages this hundred thousand year cycle has so far been pretty regular so scientists are already predicting when the next Ice Age is due and by my calculations as it's more than a hundred thousand years since the beginning of the last one that's uh just about now but instead of getting colder the world is warming scientists suspect that this natural cycle of climate change is being disrupted by human activity as a result the long-term future of our climate lies in the balance but if Britain's past is anything to go by then our future climate will bring dramatic and far-reaching changes this has been a fascinating journey for me and on the way I visited some of the most stunning places in Britain and again and again I've seen how the ice ages played a key role in the shaping of Britain they've carved out the dramatic peaks and Glen's of the highlands dotted the landscape with thousands of drumlin hills and changed the course of the mighty Thames it was the ending of an ice age that finally cut Britain off from the continent and what was born was the Britain we know today

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Length: 44min 59sec (2699 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2013