Penultimate Glacial Period

[1] The penultimate glacial period expanded ice sheets and shifted temperature zones worldwide, which had a variety of effects on the world's environment, and the organisms that lived in it.

[2] The PGP covers the last period of the Saalian glaciation in Europe, called the Wolstonian Stage in Britain, and is equivalent to the Illinoian in North America.

[6] Due to this, northern insolation (the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface) is reduced, meaning that during summer, less heat is exposed to the snows of the winter, which don't completely melt.

[8] In the Mediterranean, polar winds from the now extended ice sheets brought cooler and wetter conditions that caused a significant reduction in large vegetation such as trees.

[10] These factors combined then affected the atmospheric hydrological cycle, creating more intense seasonal winds that led to increased precipitation over south-east Asia.

[4] This simulation showed the precipitation rates over North America doubled during MIS6, which would have been a result of the icy winds expanding southward further into the continent, as well as the increased storms.

[12] Oceanic cores, taken from western Africa, show the deserts expanded, pushing the savannah and the tropical rainforests downward, and oak trees occupying the Mediterranean coast, disappeared.

[2] The dislocation of vegetation during the PGP was thought to have displaced H. sapiens,[9] although studies have shown that the region which the early humans occupied was very lightly disturbed, and a bottleneck due to the Penultimate Glacial Period is thus unlikely to have occurred.

[2] The Antarctic Zone expanded northwards until encompassing the northern Kerguelen Plateau, as evidenced by the maximum abundance of the radiolarians Dictyophimus bicornis, Pseudodictyophimus gracilipes, and P. platycephalus during this glacial.