Nineteen million years ago, during a time known as the early Miocene, massive ice sheets in Antarctica rapidly and repeatedly grew and receded.
Nineteen million years ago, during a time known as the early Miocene, massive ice sheets in Antarctica rapidly and repeatedly grew and receded. The Miocene is widely considered a potential analog for Earth’s climate in the coming century, should humanity remain on its current carbon emissions trajectory.
Identifying how and why Antarctica’s major ice sheets behaved the way they did in the early Miocene could help inform understanding of the sheets’ behavior under a warming climate. Together, the ice sheets lock a volume of water equivalent to more than 50 meters of sea level rise and influence ocean currents that affect marine food webs and regional climates. Their fate has profound consequences for life nearly everywhere on Earth.
While fluctuations in Antarctica’s ice sheets have, over the span of millions of years, grown and diminished at regular intervals tied to natural oscillations in Earth’s journey in orbit, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their collaborators around the world have uncovered evidence that Antarctica’s ice sheets grew and shrank more frequently during the Miocene epoch than was previously known.
Read more at: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Identifying how and why Antarctica’s major ice sheets behaved the way they did in the early Miocene could help inform understanding of the sheets’ behavior under a warming climate. A new study study offers an unprecedented window into the sheets’ past behavior, and it relies on a well-preserved sediment record from the Antarctic Drilling Project, or ANDRILL, pictured here. (Phot Credit: Julian Thomson / GNS Science)
