The 8.2 kiloyear (8.2ka) event was a sudden decrease in mean global temperatures that started approximately eighty-two hundred years ago. The 8.2ka event lasted between two hundred and four hundred years. This cooling event was not as cold as the previous strong cooling event in Earth’s history, the Younger Dryas (spanning the period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago). The 8.2ka event was, however, colder than the strong cooling event that followed it, the Little I (approximately 400 to 150 years ago). (The term “Little Ice Age” is used differently by different writers. Many use it to refer to the climate cooling from about 1300 to 1850, while others use it for the latter half of that interval, when cooling was greatest, beginning around 1550 or 1600.) more...