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Maximum Southwest Greenland Ice Sheet recession in the early Holocene
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Lesnek, Alia J. Briner, Jason Principal Investigator Young, Nicolás E. Cuzzone, Joshua K. |
| Copyright Year | 2020 |
| Abstract | Establishing the timing of maximum Holocene warmth in the Arctic is critical for understanding global climate system response to external forcing. In Greenland, challenges in obtaining climate records that span the full Holocene have hampered efforts to robustly identify when the Holocene Thermal Maximum occurred. Reconstructing land‐based ice sheet history can fill this gap because these ice sheet regions respond sensitively to summer temperature. We synthesize new and published Be and C ages from southwest Greenland to map Greenland ice sheet margin positions from 12 to 7 ka and calculate retreat rates from 12 to 0 ka. We found that maximum Greenland ice sheet recession occurred between ~10.4 and 9.1 ka. Our reconstruction suggests that summer air temperatures in southwest Greenland were highest from ~10.4 to 9.1 ka, providing support for an early regional Holocene Thermal Maximum. These results can serve as benchmarks for comparison with ice sheet and climate model simulations. Plain Language Summary As the climate warms, Arctic temperatures are expected to increase at a faster rate than the rest of the world. Previous research has determined that Arctic temperatures were several degrees Celsius higher than today at some point in the past 12,000 years, and understanding when this warm time occurred might give scientists important insights into Arctic climate conditions in the future. However, in Greenland, the timing of maximum warmth is not well defined because many existing climate reconstructions do not span all of the past 12,000 years. In this paper, we use the retreat rate of the western Greenland ice sheet to determine when the warmest time of the past 12,000 years occurred. This method is advantageous because (1) retreat rates of this part of the Greenland ice sheet are directly related to summer air temperature and (2) the retreat history of the western Greenland ice sheet retreat is well known. We bring together new and previously published data that relates to Greenland ice sheet change to calculate how quickly the ice sheet retreated between 12,000 years ago and the present. Using this information, we determined that the warmest time of the past 12,000 years occurred between about 10,400 and 9,100 years ago, which is several thousand years earlier than some previous estimates. These results can help improve computer simulations that are used to predict future changes in Arctic ice sheet extent, climate, and sea‐level. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1029/2019gl083164 |
| Volume Number | 47 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.glyfac.buffalo.edu/Faculty/briner/buf/pubs/Lesnek_et_al_2020.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1029/2019gl083164 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
