We are 120,000 years before present in the Alps. The climate is about the same as today. But soon after, we enter a new ice age, a cold period that will last for almost 100,000 years. What you see here is a state of the art simulation of the ice coverage during the last glaciation. To achieve this result, we have modeled the accumulation, the melting, and the dynamics of ice. Here we used information from the air bubbles trapped in ice cores from Antarctica to simulate the climate of the past. Underneath, you can see the time running at a speed of 1 millennium per second. The grey curve shows the drop in temperature compared to present day, and the blue one, the resulting increase in ice volume. The dynamics of glaciers has left a number of traces on the landscape, which are still well visible today. Glaciers caused a strong erosion of the ground, left more rains, and moved huge erratic borders over hundreds of kilometres. Soon the glaciers will reach their maximum extent. This was about 24,000 years ago. The temperatures were about 12 degrees colder than now. At that time, we could walk from France to England without setting a foot in water. After that, temperatures started to increase, the glaciers to retreat, and the sea level to rise. But today's glaciers are now threatened by global warming. Climateologists predict an increase of temperatures from 2 to 7 degrees by the end of the century. What will happen to the remaining glaciers? What you see now is the result of a very detailed model for the Alachglacia, the largest of the Alps. This simulation assumes a median increase of temperatures taken from the most recent climate projections. According to this plausible assumption, Alachglacia will have nearly disappeared by the year 2100.