Any of the periods which embraced an ice age.
A time interval during which ice sheets have spread widely across lowlands in the north. During the last million years there have been four major glacial periods. In chronological order they are the Nebraskan, the Kansan, the Saale, and the Warthe-Weischel.
any period of time during which glaciers covered a large part of the earth's surface; "the most recent ice age was during the Pleistocene"
"The Glacial Period may have lasted more than a million years. It ended in the geological yesterday, perhaps only 35,000 to 50,000 years ago." (p 13)
Time when glaciers advance and engulf huge sheets of land
A period of great cold and of enormous extension of ice upon the surface of the earth. It is believed that glacial periods have occurred repeatedly during the geological history of the earth, but the term is generally applied to the close of the Tertiary epoch, when nearly the whole of Europe was subjected to an arctic climate. 84
Any of those parts of geologic time from Precambrian onward when a much larger portion of the earth was covered by glaciers than at present.
1. Any of the geologic periods that embraced an ice age. For example, the Quaternary period may be called a "glacial period." 2. Generally, an interval of geologic time that was marked by a major equatorward advance of ice. This may be applied to an entire ice age or (rarely) to the individual glacier "stages" that make up an ice age. The term "period" here is not used in the most technical sense of a geologic period.
the period that includes the glacial epochs.
