First off, Earth is technically in an ice age right now, defined as a time when both of the planet’s poles are covered with ice. What people actually mean when they talk about an “ice age” is a “glacial period.” This is when the ice at the poles creeps toward the equator. The researchers say we could delay glaciation by up to 200,000 years from present, but by then an ice age is likely unavoidable. “If a new ice age were to come, cities like Oslo, Stockholm, and Chicago would be covered by several thousand metres of ice. “That could mean that the last ice age was actually the last ice age.”Over the next tens of thousands of years, it’s reasonable to assume that humanity will have pioneered numerous ways to geoengineer the planet’s climate on rapid timescales, so another ice age could very well be preventable.