ABSTRACT
Our understanding of the Great Ice Age began with descriptions of landforms and deposits found on the continents, and the interpretation of the palaeoclimatic record that they preserve. Large areas of the continental landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere are covered by glacial deposits, but each ice sheet impoverished the record of its predecessors by eroding away earlier sedimentary records. This means that the continental record since 2.6 Ma is fragmentary and discontinuous. The record preserved on the continental shelves is little better, for not only were some of these formerly covered by ice, they were also subjected to successive flooding and emergence as global sea-levels rose and fell with successive contractions and expansions of the cryosphere. The deep oceans, therefore, are almost the only areas where relatively undisturbed and continuous sedimentary records extending back millions of years occur; the only notable exceptions are deposits of dust (loess) in China (Chapter 5) and some sediments deposited in deep lakes. Continuous continental records providing uninterrupted time series extending back to the last and/or penultimate interglacial stages are available from ice sheets and stalactitic material in caves (Chapter 5).
