The Bolling-Allerod warming
The ice age breaks: temperatures leap, forests return, and the world seems to be over the worst.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.8 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Beginning about 14,700 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere warms abruptly — Greenland by roughly 10 degrees within a few decades — and the great ice sheets begin serious retreat. Tundra gives way to birch and pine woodland across Europe, and reindeer hunters follow the treeline north. Human populations expand rapidly out of their glacial refugia. It is the interstadial in which the late Magdalenian flourishes and Europe is recolonised.