Welcome to the New World
After 20,000 long years, the glaciers have stopped, but the world has drastically changed.
Map of the Earth’s land and sea. Light blue is sea ice, white is land ice. Land ice and sea ice become indistinguishable in more polar areas, as represented by the white gradient. Tan areas are of relatively high elevation, while brown ones are very high, though most of these areas are covered by glaciers. (Digital painting)
Most noticeably, of course, the Earth’s ice caps have grown monstrously, swallowing up areas that were previously quite warm. It may look as if half the planet is frozen, but the projection can be misleading; only about a third of the planet is under permanent ice. Partially because of the massive caps, global sea levels have fallen so much that the majority of continental shelves are now above water. These two effects have changed much about the Earth’s geography.
Many shallow inlets of the ocean, such as the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, are now lakes. Similarly, many islands and island chains, such as Cuba and the Philippines, have become part of the mainland. The most striking example of this is a large mass of land combining nearly all of Southeast Asia into one. This land is a new subcontinent, called Sundaland, and though it has appeared before during Earth's ice ages, it has never been this large. Zealandia, the lost continent, has made a comeback, if only it weren’t mostly frozen over.
Many new islands have risen from the sea while old ones have grown considerably. In some cases, entire archipelagos have fused. With all the new ice and new land, the world’s oceans are in a peculiar predicament; only three oceans are left, and all of them are nearly isolated from one another.
While the geography of the planet has stabilized, the biota have a long way to go.