The Ice Age is not over. The bigger picture is that we are still firmly in an ongoing ice age that began 34 million years ago during the Eocene-Oligocene transition. Most people associate the term 'ice age' with woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and the dramatic glacial advances of the Pleistocene - 'the Ice Age' in pop culture. This gets surprisingly little mainstream attention outside of paleoclimatology and geology circles. This broader ice age setting is known as the Late Cenozoic Ice Age (also the Antarctic Glaciation). It began 34 million years ago when permanent ice sheets formed on Antarctica, triggered when CO₂ levels dropped below 750 ppm, opening up of ocean gateways like Drake Passage (creating the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to isolate Antarctica) and tectonic shifts that favored cooling. Before then, Antarctica hosted temperate rainforests, like modern Tasmania or New Zealand, with diverse flora and fauna, including early whales and penguins. They thrived in a warmer, Gondwana connected landscape, rivers and abundant life, eventually transitioning as the continent iced over. The Late Cenozoic Ice Age is Earth's 'current icehouse' state, characterised by permanent polar ice caps. For the first 30 million years, glaciation was limited to the Southern Hemisphere. The start of the Quaternary glaciation 2.58 million years ago was the more recent and intense phase. Ice sheets began expanding into the Northern Hemisphere (the Greenland and Laurentide ice sheets during cold snaps). This process was driven by Milankovitch orbital cycles, leading to repeated glacial (cold and ice advances and retreats) and interglacial periods (warmer, when ice retreats). Today's interglacial warm period — the Holocene — began 11,700 years ago and we are in a warm interglacial right now. This came at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000–19,000 years ago) and the brief Younger Dryas cold snap. The Holocene is just the latest interglacial within the Quaternary and is not the end of the ice age. There have been at least 40 interglacial cycles, perhaps more. None of this is a mystery for geologists and paleontologists. This broader picture of climate is rarely explained. What defines an ice age in geological terms isn't just cold weather — it's the persistent presence of continental-scale ice sheets (like Antarctica and Greenland). During actual hot periods in Earth's history (much of the Mesozoic or early Cenozoic), there were no permanent polar ice caps. But as long as those massive ice volumes exist, the world is in icehouse conditions, even during warmer interglacials like ours. This narrative rarely makes it to the mainstream media. The colloquial term 'Ice Age' almost always refers to the dramatic, recent Pleistocene glacial period that shaped human evolution, such as the megafaunal extinctions and glacial scarred landscapes in the Northern Hemisphere — things people can visualize easily. The 34-million year timescale seems abstract compared with more relatable 100,000-year glacial-interglacial cycles. Media and education focus on the 'end of the last Ice Age' around 11,700 years ago - because that's when modern human civilisation (agriculture and cities) really took off. It's a reminder that the current warm, stable Holocene is only temporary in a far larger cold-dominated era. Today's interglacial period could last another 10,000 to 50,000 years. Will it be affected by increases in CO₂ levels, already blamed for observable ice loss in Greenland and West Antarctica? The last interglacial was the Eemian, 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. It was far warmer than today with higher sea levels (6-9 meters above present) due to smaller ice sheets, particularly in Antarctica. African megafauna lived along the Thames estuary and Greenland mostly green pastures. It serves as a valuable analogue, showing how polar regions and ice sheets respond to warming, suggesting significant Antarctic ice loss is driven by ocean warming. – at Bega, New South Wales