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List of periods and events in climate history 
Summary
The list of periods and events in climate history includes some notable climate events known to paleoclimatology. Knowledge of precise climatic events decreases as the record goes further back in time. The timeline of glaciation covers ice ages specifically, which tend to have their own names for phases, often with different names used for different parts of the world. The names for earlier periods and events come from geology and paleontology. The marine isotope stages (MIS) are often used to express dating within the Quaternary.
Before 1 million years ago edit
Scale: Millions of years before present, earlier dates approximate.
| Date (Mya) |
Event |
|---|---|
| Before 1,000 | Faint young Sun paradox |
| 2,400 | Great Oxidation Event probably leads to Huronian glaciation perhaps covering the whole globe |
| 650–600 | Later Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth or Marinoan glaciation, precursor to the Cambrian explosion |
| 517 | End-Botomian mass extinction; like the next two, little understood |
| 502 | Dresbachian extinction event |
| 485.4 | Cambrian–Ordovician extinction event |
| 450–440 | Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, in two bursts, after cooling perhaps caused by tectonic plate movement |
| 450 | Andean-Saharan glaciation |
| 360–260 | Karoo Ice Age |
| 305 | Cooler climate causes Carboniferous rainforest collapse |
| 251.9 | Permian–Triassic extinction event |
| 199.6 | Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, causes as yet unclear |
| 66 | Perhaps 30,000 years of volcanic activity form the Deccan Traps in India, or a large meteor impact. |
| 66 | Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary and Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, extinction of dinosaurs |
| 55.8 | Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum |
| 53.7 | Eocene Thermal Maximum 2 |
| 49 | Azolla event may have ended a long warm period |
| 5.3–2.6 | Pliocene climate became cooler and drier, and seasonal, similar to modern climates. |
| 2.5 to present | Quaternary glaciation, with permanent ice on the polar regions, many named stages in different parts of the world |
Pleistocene edit
All dates are approximate. "(B-S)" means this is one of the periods from the Blytt-Sernander sequence, originally based on studies of Danish peat bogs.
| Date (BC) |
Event |
|---|---|
| 118,000–88,000 | Abbassia Pluvial wet in North Africa |
| 108,000–8,000 | Last Glacial Period, not to be confused with the Last Glacial Maximum or Late Glacial Maximum below. (The following events also fall into this period.) |
| 48,000–28,000 | Mousterian Pluvial wet in North Africa |
| 26,500–19,000 | Last Glacial Maximum, what is often meant in popular usage by "Last Ice Age" |
| 16,000–13,000 | Oldest Dryas cold, begins slowly and ends sharply (B-S) |
| 12,700 | Antarctic Cold Reversal warmer Antarctic, sea level rise |
| 12,400 | Bølling oscillation warm and wet in the North Atlantic, begins the Bølling-Allerød period (B-S) |
| 12,400–11,500 (much discussed) |
Older Dryas cold, interrupts warm period for some centuries (B-S) |
| 12,000–11,000 | Allerød oscillation warm & moist (B-S) |
| 11,400–9,500 | Huelmo–Mascardi Cold Reversal cold in Southern Hemisphere |
| 10,800–9,500 | Younger Dryas sudden cold and dry period in Northern Hemisphere (B-S) |
| 9,500–5,500 | Holocene climatic optimum A warm period about 4.9 °C warmer than the LGM |
Holocene edit
All dates are BC (BCE) and approximate. "(B-S)" means this is one of the periods from the Blytt-Sernander sequence, originally based on studies of Danish peat bogs.
| Date (BC) |
Event |
|---|---|
| From 10,000 | Holocene glacial retreat, the present Holocene or Postglacial period begins |
| 9400 | Pre-Boreal sharp rise in temperature over 50 years (B-S), precedes Boreal |
| 8500–6900 | Boreal (B-S), rising sea levels, forest replaces tundra in northern Europe |
| 7500–3900 | Neolithic Subpluvial/African humid period in North Africa, wet |
| 7000–3000 | Holocene climatic optimum, or Atlantic in northern Europe (B-S) |
| 6200 | 8.2-kiloyear event cold |
| 5000–4100 | Older Peron warm and wet, global sea levels were 2.5 to 4 meters (8 to 13 feet) higher than the twentieth-century average |
| 3900 | 5.9 kiloyear event dry and cold. |
| 3500 | End of the African humid period, Neolithic Subpluvial in North Africa, expands Sahara Desert |
| 3000 – 0 | Neopluvial in North America |
| 3,200–2,900 | Piora Oscillation, cold, perhaps not global. Wetter in Europe, drier elsewhere, linked to the domestication of the horse in Central Asia. |
| 2200 | 4.2-kiloyear event dry, lasted most of the 22nd century BC, linked to the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, various archaeological cultures in Persia and China |
| 1800–1500 | Middle Bronze Age Cold Epoch, a period of unusually cold climate in the North Atlantic region |
| Bond Event 2 | Possibly triggering the Late Bronze Age collapse |
| 900–300 | Iron Age Cold Epoch cold in North Atlantic. Perhaps associated with the Homeric Minimum |
| 250 BC–400 AD | Roman Warm Period |
Common Era/AD edit
- Climate changes of 535-536 (535–536 AD), sudden cooling and failure of harvests, perhaps caused by volcanic dust
- 900–1300 Medieval Warm Period, wet in Europe, arid in North America, may have depopulated the Great Plains of North America, associated with the Medieval renaissances in Europe
- Great Famine of 1315–1317 in Europe
- Little Ice Age: Various dates between 1250 and 1550 or later are held to mark the start of the Little ice age, ending at equally varied dates around 1850
- 1460–1550 Spörer Minimum cold
- 1656–1715 Maunder Minimum low sunspot activity
- 1790–1830 Dalton Minimum low sunspot activity, cold
- 1816 Year Without a Summer, caused by volcanic dust of Mount Tambora eruption
- 1850–present Retreat of glaciers since 1850, instrumental temperature record
- Present and recent past global warming, perhaps to be named the Anthropocene period