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The book Ehlers, Gibbard, Hughes: Quaternary Glaciations - Extent and Chronology Volume 15: A closer look presents an up-to-date, detailed overview of Quaternary glaciations all over the world, including the presentation of digital maps which can be used in a geographical information system (GIS) and all recent information on the impact global and climate change has on these glaciations and the impact on our Earth. The maps (Google Earth files) as well as related digital information are available on this companion website.

With these larger scale digital base maps, the accuracy of the information is increased by a factor of 16. The difference is striking. Unfortunately, no single, uniform base map can be used at the 1:250,000 scale, therefore, in order to cope with the different levels of accuracy encountered, some of the layers of information have been grouped, so that only consistent information is shown together.

All the spatial data are given in shapefiles to allow for easy import into other GIS systems. As not all readers will have ArcGIS at their disposal, in order to allow the non-GIS community a glimpse at the maps some are available as PDFs and also as KMZ files that can be read using Google Earth. Nevertheless the user must be aware of the fact that those files are only images, and their contents are restricted to what has been selected by the author.

We hope that the current map set will be widely used, and that it will form the basis for further investigations.