The oldest cores of Ice found (and they won't get any older, for that ice is already gone) are some 600.000 years old Holden.
120.000 years are way in the caveman business anyway.
And do you then prefere to belive that since the cores in Greenland are only that old because you cannot find any older ice? Do you have any idea of the "prints" that advancing and retreating Ice leaves in the landscape?
Anyway, they're leaving.
Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850#GreenlandNot sure if the 20 mi number comes from "Icecap at all", since the planet sometimes roll around a little, but here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_packs"The Arctic Sea has not been ice free for a period of at least one million years, and probably much longer"
That belongs to the Arctic where it is.
Here they go down to 40 million years, as a notch to the cooling period starting, but hell didn't freeze over in a day...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_history"On longer time scales, sediment cores show that the cycles of glacials and interglacials are part of a deepening phase within a prolonged ice age that began with the glaciation of Antarctica approximately 40 million years ago. This deepening phase, and the accompanying cycles, largely began approximately 3 million years ago with the growth of continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere."
So we don't know of the sea ice, but there was continental ice in sheets.
To cut a long story short, the Northern sea-ice is leaving, FAST. Something that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions decides to turn to water in a span of less than 100. In the meantime there is a bunch of people saying that it ain't happening.
Our melting speed is actually less than a promille of the time manifested as an absolute minimum BTW, just to get the proportions right.
