Data which have recently become available reveal that at the time of maximum cooling in the late‐Pleistocene (20,000–18,000 B.P.), rather than a super‐Panarctic ice sheet with major domes located over the Kara and Barents seas, the true picture was of a number of relatively small ice caps located primarily on mountain areas. These specifically were the Scandinavian, Novaya Zemlya, and Polar Urals ice caps; smaller ice caps were centered over Britain, Svalbard, Franz‐Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya, Eastern Taymyr, the Putorana and Verkhoyansk mountains. The Barents and Kara seas were largely free of glacier ice. Maximum advances of these various ice caps were often non‐synchronous; for example there is evidence from the northern part of the North Russian Plain that it was initially covered by ice from Novaya Zemlya and the Polar Urals, then later by Scandinavian ice. In general there was a progressive diminution in the size of the ice caps from west to east reflecting increasingly continental conditions in this direction. Similarly conditions for the nourishment of ice caps were significantly less favorable in the High Arctic as compared to the mid‐latitudes. During the early Valday (Zyryan time) it would appear that the situation was reversed, with ice caps of massive dimensions over Western and Central Siberia but only relatively limited ice cover over Scandinavia.