Abstract
DURING the last ice age, the Barents Sea ice sheet began to grow 22 kyr ago1, only 8 kyr before it began to disintegrate2. This implies that the ice must have grown very rapidly from the coast to the edge of the continental shelf. Such rapid growth of a large ice sheet requires significant amounts of moisture3, but the origin of this moisture has been unclear, particularly as the CLIMAP climate reconstruction suggests4,5 that the Greenland–Iceland–Norwegian (GIN) seas were perennially ice-covered during this period. Here we present data from deep-sea sediment cores from the Fram Strait, which suggest that relatively warm water from the North Atlantic Ocean was advected into the GIN seas in two short-term events (27–22.5 and 19.5–14.5 kyr ago). We suggest that the resulting seasonally ice-free waters were an important regional moisture source for the Barents Sea ice sheet, and that the GIN seas played a much more active role in climate during the last glaciation than has previously been supposed.
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Hebbeln, D., Dokken, T., Andersen, E. et al. Moisture supply for northern ice-sheet growth during the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature 370, 357–360 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1038/370357a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/370357a0
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