Elephant Hall’s Tundra Fauna
Ireland was then in the last Ice Age, but it was not simply a country buried beneath an unchanging white sheet. The climate of Marine Isotope Stage 3 swung repeatedly between relatively milder interstadials and severe cold phases. Ice expanded and contracted across the wider British–Irish region over long timescales, while the extent of ice within Ireland varied by region and remains an active subject of research. The great ice-sheet maximum lay later, broadly during the period after c. 27,000 years ago, rather than providing a fixed setting for every earlier millennial moment.