The transition from the last ice age to the current warm period was interupted by a ~1000-year return to glacial conditions. Most of the evidence for this Younger Dryas (YD) event comes from in and around the North Atlantic, and the geographical extent of the event remains uncertain. In his Perspective, Rodbell reviews the evidence for and against a YD event in the Southern Hemisphere and highlights the study by Bennett et al., who have found no evidence for a YD event in four lake records from southern Chile.