Recovery from the last ice age
About
15,000 years ago, the earth began to warm and the huge ice sheets covering much
of North America and
Eurasia began to melt. This had a
number of impacts:
(1) lake formation in regions left behind by glaciers
(2) sea level rise.
(3)
colonization of formerly glaciated regions by vegetation, and huge changes in the
ecology of other regions
due to the overall global-scale warming.
The
period since the great ice sheets melted is known as the Holocene