World Of Two Halves

It looks like a graphic from a Discovery Channel programme about a distant ice age. But this astonishing picture shows the world as it is today - with half the Northern Hemisphere covered with snow and ice.

Credit NOAA:

That's about the area covered by glaciers during the last glaciation period which ended about 12,000 years before present time.

The startling image was released on the same day Al Gore stepped up to defend his claim that global warming causes more snow. Thirty states in America were affected by a two-day blizzard, bitter cold.