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Palaeoclimatology

A glimpse of the glacial

Nature volume 391, pages 338–339 (1998)Cite this article

During most of the past 100,000 years, temperatures on Earth were much colder than they are now and climate was very unstable. About 21,000 years ago that climatic period culminated in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when about 50 million km3 of water was locked in huge ice sheets, lowering sea level by more than 120 metres. Climate during the LGM was clearly very different from what it is today. But how different? This is the subject of the paper by Ganopolski et al. on page 351 of this issue1.

Using a properly tuned, simplified, coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model, they first verify the model's ability to simulate modern climate on the global scale. After adapting insolation, concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and ice-sheet distribution to values typical for the LGM, they find that the same model yields a stable climatic state with other atmospheric and oceanic characteristics that are reminiscent of the LGM. The simulated changes are broadly consistent with what we know from decades of invaluable analyses of marine sediments, polar and tropical ice cores, tree rings and groundwater — all of which are archives that record past climatic changes.

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Figure 1: CLIMAP10 reconstruction of sea-surface temperature in August at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), 21,000 years ago.

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  1. the Division of Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas F. Stocker

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Stocker, T. A glimpse of the glacial. Nature 391, 338–339 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/34797

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