Earth went through its famous Ice Age , the one adapted into those beloved animated films that captured the era’s kid-friendly hijinks. But what you didn’t know is that we almost had a sequel to the Ice Age. 2,000 years ago, according to new research published in Science , we were set to begin a brand-new era of cold, but then humanity’s industrialization kicked into high gear and called it all off.

Evidence of this aborted Ice Age was found atop Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic at the Barnes Ice, a remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Barnes is frozen solid down to its bedrock, which preserved a lot of the ancient moss that was killed when the ice expanded, creating a well-preserved timeline.

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Columbia University paleoclimatologist Nicolás Young and his team carbon-dated these old mosses and examined the buildup of a form of beryllium on rocks to get a sense of when it was exposed to cosmic rays and the atmosphere.…