Introduction Glacial erratic boulders are plucked from bedrock by flowing ice, transported in the direction of ice flow, and deposited at the terminus of the glacier. If derived from a localized, distinctive region of bedrock, glacial erratics may be used as indicator stones to map the direction of ice flow. Furthermore, glacial erratics evolve during transport, becoming smaller and more rounde...

The terrestrial cryosphere includes >198,000 glaciers and three ice sheets (Pfeffer et al., 2014). The paradigm of cryospheric environments as “germless continents” (Byrd, 1938) has shifted to ecosystems (Kohshima, 1984; Hodson et al., 2008). Indeed, the terrestrial cryosphere constitutes a “forgotten biome” (Anesio and Laybourn-Parry, 2012) with microbial processes influencing the fundamental ...

Throughout the last ∼ 900 kyr, the Late Pleistocene, Earth has experienced periods of cold glacial climate, punctuated by seven abrupt transitions to warm interglacials, the so-called terminations. Although most of glacial ice is located in the Northern Hemisphere (NH), the Southern Hemisphere (SH) seems to play a crucial role in deglaciation. Variation in the seasonal distribution of solar ins...

[1] The causes for and possible predictions of rapid climate changes are poorly understood. The most pronounced changes observed, beside the glacial terminations, are the Dansgaard‐Oeschger events. Present day general circulation climate models simulating glacial conditions are not capable of reproducing these rapid shifts. It is thus not known if they are due to bifurcations in the structural ...

Growth periods and stable isotope analyses of speleothems from Hoti Cave in northern Oman provide a record of continental pluvial periods extending back over the past four of Earth’s glacial-interglacial cycles. Rapid speleothem growth occurred during the early to middle Holocene (6–10.5 ka B.P.), 78–82 ka B.P., 120–135 ka B.P., 180–200 ka B.P., and 300–325 ka B.P. The speleothem calcite deposi...

The resistance to sliding beneath soft-bedded glaciers de5 pends on the effective stress N , which is controlled by the subglacial hy6 drological system. While large-scale water transport is primarily through 7 conduits, the effective stress profile beneath most of the glacier base is 8 expected to be controlled by seepage flows through the permeable sed9 iments. Models of the response to force...

Petrological investigations of the sand fraction and of granuleto cobble-sized clasts in the Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary cycles of the AND-1B drill core at the NW edge of the Ross Ice Shelf (McMurdo Sound) highlight significant down-core modal and compositional variations. These variations provide: (i) direct information about potential source regions during both glacial maxima and minima; and...

The cryosphere contains a rich archive of the climate record, and is an important part of the global hydrological cycle. The investigation of the glacial behaviour informs our understanding of the forces that have shaped landscapes in glaciated terrains, and is key to developing understanding of past and future climate change and global climate teleconnections. Numerical modelling of glacial sy...

[1] In 2003, Ekström et al. reported on the detection of a new class of earthquakes that occur in glaciated regions, with the vast majority being in Greenland. The events have a characteristic radiation pattern and lack the high-frequency content typical of tectonic earthquakes. It was proposed that the events correspond to large and sudden sliding motion of glaciers. Here we present an analysi...