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Climate science

How Antarctic ice retreats

Nature volume 510, pages 39–40 (2014)Cite this article

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New records of iceberg-rafted debris from the Scotia Sea reveal episodic retreat of the Antarctic Ice Sheet since the peak of the last glacial period, in step with changes in climate and global sea level. See Letter p.134

About 19,000 years ago, the ice sheets that covered large areas of North America and Eurasia began to melt. The ice on Antarctica also melted, but to a lesser extent — most of it still exists today. Understanding past ice-sheet instability and melting is important for predicting future ice behaviour in a warming world. On page 134 of this issue, Weber et al.1 present new well-dated records of iceberg-rafted debris from two marine sediment cores from the Scotia Sea that reveal at least eight episodes of ice loss from Antarctica between 20,000 and 9,000 years ago. These records allow examination of interactions between temperature, ice melt and the water masses of the Southern Ocean, which are central to the carbon cycle and to climate change between glacial and interglacial periods.

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Figure 1: Iceberg-rafted debris from marine sediment offshore of Porpoise Bay, East Antarctica.

Elizabeth Pierce

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  1. Trevor Williams is at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964, USA.,

    Trevor Williams

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  1. Trevor Williams
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Correspondence to Trevor Williams.

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Williams, T. How Antarctic ice retreats. Nature 510, 39–40 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13345

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