[kuprel]

I didn't realize that the vast majority of the time Earth is in an ice age. What causes it periodically like this?

[slashdev]

It’s mostly caused by Milankovitch cycles. Which are cyclic variations in our orbit around the sun.

The earth varies in distance to the sun and axial tilt and precession. Like waves, there factors can either overlap and somewhat cancel or they can stack for a larger effect.

[TSiege]

The planet is 4.5 billion years old! 400,000 years is just roughly 0.0089% of earth's history (and I rounded up!)

[wasmitnetzen]

Humans are only about 300 000 years old though, so that part is much more relevant to our species than the rest.

[autokad]

ice ages didn't happen until after the asteroid strike. Antarctica moving into the south pole is likely a large part of it, but they don't really understand ice ages that well TBO. Anyhoo, the Earth was a lot warmer prior to the strike and we have been going through extinction events every 100k years.

[mkl]

By "the" asteroid strike I'm guessing you mean the one 66M years ago? There were definitely ice ages before that, likely including one or more Snowball Earth phases (the whole surface frozen): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth.