The Laurentide Was the Size of Antarctica. The Cordilleran Was the Size of Greenland.

At the peak of the last ice age, North America was covered by not one but two separate and massive ice sheets - distinct from the Greenland ice sheet which was an entity unto itself. The Laurentide was the larger of the two - roughly equivalent in size to the ice sheet that currently covers Antarctica. Its center was positioned over Hudson Bay and it extended all the way to the flanks of the Rocky Mountains in western Canada. The second ice sheet - the Cordilleran - stretched from northern Idaho and Washington State all the way up through British Columbia to Alaska, reaching a scale comparable to the modern Greenland ice sheet.

The combined weight, volume, and geographic coverage of these two ice sheets is almost impossible to fully visualize from the landscape that exists today. Randall is building toward the question that the existence of these ice sheets inevitably raises - how long were they there, and what happened when they were gone. The answer to that second question is the foundation of everything Randall has been documenting throughout his research into catastrophic floods, sea level rise, isostatic rebound, and the civilizations that existed beneath and beside them before the ice collapsed.

RANDALL AT QUEST FOR ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

Get your exclusive ticket in the Randall Carlson dedicated seating section at Quest for Ancient Civilizations in Sedona, May 13, 2026