The researchers used computer modeling to project the rapid movement of floodwaters during deglaciation between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
Massive freshwater river flows stemming from glacier-fed flooding at the end of the last ice age surged across eastern Washington to the Columbia River and out to the North Pacific Ocean, where they triggered climate changes throughout the northern hemisphere, new research published today in Science Advances shows.
The findings provide new insight into the role the North Pacific Ocean plays in the planet’s climate, said Alan Mix, an oceanographer and paleoclimatologist in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and one of the study’s authors.
“We look to the past to give us context for what might happen in the future,” Mix said. “We didn’t know before this research that the increase in freshwater flows was going to trigger widespread changes. It tells us this system is sensitive to these kinds of changes.”
The lead author of the study is Summer Praetorius, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey who first started constructing records involved in the project as a doctoral student at Oregon State more than a decade ago.
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