As a graduate student one of the things I studied was the climate of the last Ice Age about 18,000 years ago.  Physics Today just published a really interesting study of the end of the Ice Age in Europe and how changes in sea level affected life there. It’s based on a computer simulation that looks at changes in the mass of land ice and its relation to sea level and has some interesting things to say about what is happening now with Greenland and Antarctic melting. While many people disparage the use of climate models to project what the future might be like, they can often give us new insights into how climate has changed in the past, and give us more confidence in what we might expect in the future.  You can read the article at https://phys.org/news/2017-06-collapse-european-ice-sheet-chaos.html.

The sea level rise and the colossal amounts of meltwater discharged from the collapsing ice sheet meant that areas that previously were land eventually became seabed. Britain and Ireland, which had been joined to Europe throughout the last ice age, finally separated with the flooding of the English Channel around 10,000 years ago. Credit: Henry Patton/CAGE