1. Department of Geosciences, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York 13323, USA
2. Department of Geology, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York 13346, USA
3. Department of Geology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois 62901, USA
4. Department of Stratigraphy, Paleontology, and Marine Geosciences, University of Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
5. Physics Department, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York 13323, USA
6. Department of Geography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario ON K7L 3N6, Canada
7. Department of Earth Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA

Correspondence to: Eugene Domack¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to E.D. (Email: edomack@hamilton.edu).

Abstract

The stability of the Antarctic ice shelves in a warming climate has long been discussed¹, and the recent collapse of a significant part, over 12,500 km² in area, of the Larsen ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula^{2, 3} has led to a refocus toward the implications of ice shelf decay for the stability of Antarctica's grounded ice^{4, 5, 6}. Some smaller Antarctic ice shelves have undergone periodic growth and decay over the past 11,000 yr (refs 7–11), but these ice shelves are at the climatic limit of ice shelf viability¹² and are therefore expected to respond rapidly to natural climate variability at century to millennial scales^{8, 9, 10, 11}. Here we use records of diatoms, detrital material and geochemical parameters from six marine sediment cores in the vicinity of the Larsen ice shelf to demonstrate that the recent collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is unprecedented during the Holocene. We infer from our oxygen isotope measurements in planktonic foraminifera that the Larsen B ice shelf has been thinning throughout the Holocene, and we suggest that the recent prolonged period of warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region^{13, 14}, in combination with the long-term thinning, has led to collapse of the ice shelf.

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