Watch an ancient ice sheet cover the British Isles then vanish, in eerie time-lapse animation

An animation that spans tens of thousands of years shows an ancient ice sheet growing into a land mass that would one day be known as Great Britain and Ireland. The ice retreats to expose the land once more.

The British-Irish ice sheet was formed about 33,000 years ago. The land was covered in ice around 10,000 years ago. After 5000 years, the glacier had vanished in a flash. As the last ice age drew to a close, human populations that had fled a millennia-long winter came back to settle the land.

The animation shows how quickly the British-Irish Ice Sheet fell. Scientists may be able to better understand how climate change contributes to sea-level rise by using the data behind the animation.

There are ancient ice sheets carved below the ocean.

Over the past century, scientists have slowly carved out details of its formation and decline, publishing their findings in more than 1,000 scientific publications. The spectre of human-caused climate change drove one team of BRITICE- CHRONO researchers to bring together existing data and collect more The scientists visualized the most complete picture to date of the ice sheet's rise and fall.

The BRITICE- CHRONO team scoured prior studies and compiled data on more than 20,000 landforms that exist along the path of the ice sheet. Some of the sites that the scientists collected data from were only accessible via submarine. The time of the glacier's retreat from carbon was estimated using features in the terrain.

The team fed the data into a computer model that assessed how the ice would have interacted with the environment over tens of thousands of years. The maps were presented as a time-lapse of the glacier's expansion.

Climate scientists studying the alarming decline of two modern ice sheets may be able to learn from the details of the growth and collapse of this particular ice sheet. The United States is covered in 22 feet of ice, or enough to cover the entire surface of the moon, according to NASA.

According to the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change, melted ice has been the biggest contributor to sea-level rise in the past few decades. According to a study in Nature Climate Change, even if humans were to cut fossil fuel emissions tomorrow, the sea level would still rise by 10 inches.

There will be more punishing storms with worse flooding and the mass displacement of millions of people who live along the coast because of rising sea levels. Scientists may be able to predict the decline of modern ice sheets by looking back at the lifespan of long-gone ice sheets.