Holocene reconfiguration and readvance of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Greenwood, Sarah L.; Simkins, Lauren M.; Halberstadt, Anna Ruth W.; Prothro, Lindsay O.; Anderson, John B.

Holocene reconfiguration and readvance of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

Files

s41467-018-05625-3.pdf (3.66 MB)

Date

2018

Authors

Greenwood, Sarah L.

Simkins, Lauren M.

Halberstadt, Anna Ruth W.

Prothro, Lindsay O.

Anderson, John B.

Publisher

Springer Nature

Abstract

How ice sheets respond to changes in their grounding line is important in understanding ice sheet vulnerability to climate and ocean changes. The interplay between regional grounding line change and potentially diverse ice flow behaviour of contributing catchments is relevant to an ice sheet’s stability and resilience to change. At the last glacial maximum, marine-based ice streams in the western Ross Sea were fed by numerous catchments draining the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here we present geomorphological and acoustic stratigraphic evidence of ice sheet reorganisation in the South Victoria Land (SVL) sector of the western Ross Sea. The opening of a grounding line embayment unzipped ice sheet sub-sectors, enabled an ice flow direction change and triggered enhanced flow from SVL outlet glaciers. These relatively small catchments behaved independently of regional grounding line retreat, instead driving an ice sheet readvance that delivered a significant volume of ice to the ocean and was sustained for centuries.

Type

Journal article

Citation

Greenwood, Sarah L., Simkins, Lauren M., Halberstadt, Anna Ruth W., et al.. "Holocene reconfiguration and readvance of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet." Nature Communications, 9, (2018) Springer Nature: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05625-3.

Published Version

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05625-3

Rights

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.