A new global ice sheet reconstruction for the past 80 000 years

Global Ice Sheet Mapping Observatory

Global Warming and the Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland coastal temperatures have followed the early 20th century global warming trend. Since 1940, however, the Greenland coastal stations data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend. At the summit of the Greenland ice sheet the summer average temperature has decreased at the rate of 2.2 ◦C per decade since the beginning of the measurements in 1987. This suggests that the Greenland...

Modeling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years

The West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), with ice volume equivalent to ~5 m of sea level,1 has long been considered capable of past and future catastrophic collapse.2, 3, 4 Today, the ice sheet is fringed by vulnerable floating ice shelves that buttress the fast flow of inland ice streams. Grounding lines are several hundred meters below sea level and the bed deepens upstream, raising the prospect ...

The Eurasian ice sheet reinforces the East Asian summer monsoon during the interglacial 500 000 years ago

Deep-sea and ice-core records show that interglacial periods were overall less “warm” before about 420 000 years ago than after, with relatively higher ice volume and lower greenhouse gases concentration. This is particularly the case for the interglacial Marine Isotope Stage 13 which occurred about 500 000 years ago. However, by contrast, the loess and other proxy records from China suggest an...

A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years.

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<...