It doesn't much like it, but at Yorkshire Museum right now there's an ice age going on. Courtesy York Museums Trust.

Staff at Yorkshire Museum are appealing for people with memories or photographs of the Ice Age to help them create a new exhibition.

Chances are you’re thinking Ice Age? Eh? Did they have cameras back then? Well, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, but in truth we’re still in the Great Ice Age.

According to the Curator of Geology at Yorkshire Museum, Camilla Nichols, this Great Ice Age has been going on for the last two million years.

"You say Ice Age and everybody thinks about woolly mammoths," Camilla told the 24 Hour Museum, "but in actual fact it was lots of cold bits punctuated with lots of hot bits."

"In the last two million years it's only been frozen seven percent of the time and yet it’s had such a fundamental impact on our landscape."

So, to help build up a picture of how the climate of an ice age fluctuates, the museum is planning an exhibition that will take visitors on a journey through the last two million years.

It looks pretty nice right now, but once upon a time York was under snow and ice. Photo: Jon Pratty. © 24 Hour Museum.

Running from May 28 until December 31 2005, the exhibition will look at the way climate affects life on Earth and the landscape around us.

Using artefacts from glacial rocks to animal bones, it will take in the cold bits and the hot bits, examining the impact that different climates can have, on plants, animals and us humans.

Which is where museum staff are hoping the public will be able to help out. To illustrate how climate can change very quickly, part of the exhibition will feature displays about the two most recent big freezes, the winters of 1947 and 1963.

Martin Lunn, Curator of Astronomy for York Museums Trust, is building this section and although he has plenty of images from 1947 images of 1963, which particularly affected the north of England, are proving harder to come by.

"The temperatures dropped on Boxing Day 1962 and the freeze lasted until March 1963," explained Martin. "Although 1947 had more snow, 1963 was the coldest winter since 1740 and temperatures got as low as -20°C."

With our mild winters these days, it's hard to believe you could once play football under that bridge. Photo: Jon Pratty. © 24 Hour Museum.

In particular, Martin is hoping to hear from anyone who remembers this period and can help him bring alive the conditions with memories and photographs.

"In York the River Ouse was frozen over and the ice was four to five inches thick," he said, "there are reports of people playing football under Lendal Bridge."

"The years 1947 and 1963 are the only examples we’ve got in living memory of what it is like to experience really cold weather. During the cold periods of the Ice Age this was permanent and was what people would have had to be able to survive through."

While these major periods last occurred thousands of years ago, as Martin explained, those days could well return in the not too distant future.

"They’re the conditions we can expect within the next 20 years according to some scientists, who have predicted that the Atlantic Conveyor, or the Gulf Stream, which warms our shores will turn off because the ice is melting in Greenland."

If anyone out there has any photos or memories of winter 1963, Martin Lunn can be contacted at Yorkshire Museum, Museum Gardens, York, YO1 1FR or by email: martin.lunn@ymt.org.uk.