I think we’re all becoming familiar with the “disappearing glaciers” images; we are shown a huge ice field in an old black and white photograph, and we compare it to a recent full-color view where all we see are rocks and water. The comparison is not perfect—I’m often left wondering if they changed the view, or did some kind of photo manipulation, to make the changes look even more dramatic. I’ve heard that we’ll soon be able to watch time-lapse films of glaciers receding over a six-month period.

Maybe that moving image will help the strangeness of it sink in deeper. Because, after all, what we are witnessing is the stuff of geologic history – the chapter in an old Geology book where they talk about the “end of the ice-ages” and the “extinction of the saber-tooth tiger and woolly mammoth.” I always wanted to see a saber-tooth tiger – their skeletons in museums seem so fresh compared to the stone dinosaurs, almost like you just missed seeing the last live one wandering around some remote place in the mountains of Canada.

And yet we are talking about the change of geologic ages—those formidable names on archeology tests—the end of the Oligocene and the beginning of the Pleistocene. And here we are today, watching the glaciers disappear, not in the thousands of years that make up those ancient ages of the world, but before our cameras.