Island-building in Southeast Asia created Earth's northern ice sheets

Tectonic processes are thought to have triggered past ice ages, but how? A new analysis of mountain building in the maritime tropics of Southeast Asia attributes the last ice age, which reached a maximum 15,000 years ago, to increasing rock weathering in the rising island arc from Sumatra to New Guinea over the past 15 million years, with the first ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere appearing about 3 million years ago.

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