Deglacial temperature history of West Antarctica

The most recent glacial to interglacial transition constitutes a remarkable natural experiment for learning how Earth’s climate responds to various forcings, including a rise in atmospheric CO₂. This transition has left a direct thermal remnant in the polar ice sheets, where the exceptional puri...ty and continual accumulation of ice permit analyses not possible in other settings. For Antarctica, the deglacial warming has previously been constrained only by the water isotopic composition in ice cores, without an absolute thermometric assessment of the isotopes’ sensitivity to temperature. To overcome this limitation, we measured temperatures in a deep borehole and analyzed them together with ice-core data to reconstruct the surface temperature history of West Antarctica. The deglacial warming was 11.3 ± 1.8 °C, approximately two to three times the global average, in agreement with theoretical expectations for Antarctic amplification of planetary temperature changes. Consistent with evidence from glacier retreat in Southern Hemisphere mountain ranges, the Antarctic warming was mostly completed by 15 kyBP, several millennia earlier than in the Northern Hemisphere. These results constrain the role of variable oceanic heat transport between hemispheres during deglaciation and qu Ausführliche Beschreibung Beschreibung ausblenden

1. Person:	Cuffey, Kurt M.
Weitere Personen:	Clow, Gary D.; Steig, Eric J.; Buizert, Christo; Fudge, T. J.; Koutnik, Michelle; Waddington, Edwin D.; Alley, Richard B.; Severinghaus, Jeffrey P.
Quelle:	in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 113, No. 50 (2016), p. 14249-14254 Weitere Artikel
Format:	Online-Artikel
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	2016
Beschreibung:	Online-Ressource
Schlagworte:	climate paleoclimate Antarctica glaciology temperature
Online Zugang:	Volltext
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Anmerkung:	Copyright: Volumes 1–89 and 106–113, copyright as a collective work only; author(s) retains copyright to individual articles