Project Timescape

• During the Cretaceous period, when the chalk was being deposited, the climate was much warmer than at present.
• The Antarctic ice sheet is made of layers of ice which have accumulated each year, continuously over something like a million years. Each ice layer contains trapped air bubbles which can tell us about the atmospheric composition and temperature when it was formed. For 800,000 years the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide stayed well below the levels reached in recent decades.
• During the Ice Ages, Britain was only sporadically inhabitable. Neanderthal people, the cousins of modern humans, arrived during warmer periods and lived in caves such as those at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire

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