Introduction

Ice ages and the tropics – do they go together? The ideas associated with the ice ages include massive glaciers, tundras, ice-age wildlife (mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, woolly rhino, etc.), hunter-gatherers, but not tropical forests, coral reefs, tropical wildlife. The tropics have always fascinated mankind in the Old World (Greeks, Middle Ages, modern times). It was a foreign world to them. Only today, through the globalization of trade, tourism, industrial production, globalized media (disasters!) and markets, the tropics move more and more, almost daily, into our consciousness. But who thinks of the tropics when questions of past climate history are discussed? Or problems of ice ages, warm periods, sudden climate changes? Or questions about our climate future?