Ice Age Melt Offers Future Climate Clues
University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson looking at an ice margin in south Greenland that is changing from being marine based to land based and thus slowing down and becoming more predictable. (Photo: Rob Hatfield, Oregon State University)
When the climate began to warm during the last Ice Age about 23,000 years ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in ice.
In two new studies published this week in Nature Geoscience, researchers describe how ice sheets behaved in the past could help scientists better predict what might happen to them in a warmer world of our future.
University of Wisconsin geologist Anders Carlson studies ice sheet melt from land and ocean sediment cores. His study describes what prehistoric Earth was like in North America and Northern Europe some 140,000 years ago.
“What we found in this paper was that ice that’s resting on land it responded very quickly to the warming climate, but then it didn’t retreat really rapidly. It kind of chugged along and slowly melted like an ice cube if you put a hair dryer on it,” Carlson says, adding that was not the case with ice sheets floating on the ocean. “Marine based ice sheets behave unpredictably. They may not do anything for a while, and then they all of a sudden respond very abruptly. They can rapidly disappear.”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25