Strangers in a Strange Land

The province of British Columbia wasn't always so lush. Great ice sheets covered parts of the province burying it under hundreds of meters of ice during the Pleistocene era (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). As the glaciers retreated with warming at the end of the last ice age, their presence was left on the scars of the landscape. Their disappearance also exposed the land underneath, churning it, and making the region suitable for colonization by plants and animals that migrated from elsewhere.

Another question is whether the glaciers will return. Although they left the lowlands 12,000 years ago, there is no evidence that we are out of the Ice Age. The last two million years have been times of almost constant change, and if past patterns are any indication, we may only be living in a short interval of warmth amid a long period of ice. Looking at the past 200,000 years as a whole, many of the plants and animals species of southern British Columbia are more correctly seen as residents of California and Oregon visiting here temporarily during the warm season. p. 91

British Columbia: A Natural History by Richard Cannings and Sydney Cannings (1996).

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