Latest Last glacial period Stories
A set of maps created by the University of Sheffield have illustrated, for the first time, how our last British ice sheet shrunk during the Ice Age.Led by Professor Chris Clark from the University´s Department of Geography, a team of experts developed the maps to understand what effect the current shrinking of ice sheets in parts of the Antarctic and Greenland will have on the speed of sea level rise.The unique maps record the pattern and speed of shrinkage of the large ice sheet that...
For years, geologists have argued about the processes that formed steep inner gorges in the broad glacial valleys of the Swiss Alps.The U-shaped valleys were created by slow-moving glaciers that behaved something like road graders, eroding the bedrock over hundreds or thousands of years. When the glaciers receded, rivers carved V-shaped notches, or inner gorges, into the floors of the glacial valleys. But scientists disagreed about whether those notches were erased by subsequent glaciers and...
Southampton researchers have estimated that sea-level rose by an average of about 1 meter per century at the end of the last Ice Age, interrupted by rapid "˜jumps' during which it rose by up to 2.5 meters per century. The findings, published in Global and Planetary Change, will help unravel the responses of ocean circulation and climate to large inputs of ice-sheet meltwater to the world ocean.Global sea level rose by a total of more than 120 meters as the vast ice sheets of the last Ice...
The landform known as a drumlin, created when the ice advanced during the Ice Age, can also be produced by today's glaciers. This discovery, made by researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has just been published in the scientific journal Geology.Drumlins generally consist of an accumulation of glacial debris "“ till "“ and are found in areas that were covered by ice sheet. As the ice advanced, it moved rocks, gravel and sand and created tear-shaped raised ridges running...
A team from the National Museum of Natural Sciences (CSIC) has analyzed the impact of climate change on spotted hyena survival in Europe over 10,000 years ago. These changes played an important role, but the scientists say studies are still needed to look at the influence of human expansion and changes in herbivorous fauna on the definitive extinction of this species across the continent."Climate change in the past was not directly responsible for the extinction of the spotted hyena in...
NASA and European researchers have conducted a novel study to simultaneously measure, for the first time, trends in how water is transported across Earth's surface and how the solid Earth responds to the retreat of glaciers following the last major Ice Age, including the shifting of Earth's center of mass.To calculate the changes, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands; and the Netherlands Institute for Space...
New Zealand glaciers melted as European glaciers briefly expandedAs the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned.But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up.For the two decades since ice core records revealed simultaneous warming and cooling at opposite ends of the planet during this time period, scientists have looked for an explanation.Results...
North Pacific circulation radically changed by past post-glacial warmingToward the end of the last ice age, a major reorganization took place in the current system of the North Pacific with far-reaching implications for climate, according to a new study published in the July 9, 2010, issue of Science by an international team of scientists from Japan, Hawaii, and Belgium.Earth's climate is regulated largely by the world ocean's density-driven circulation, which brings warm surface water to the...
A chain of past natural events may hold lessons for the futureScientists still puzzle over how Earth emerged from its last ice age, an event that ushered in a warmer climate and the birth of human civilization. In the geological blink of an eye, ice sheets in the northern hemisphere began to collapse and warming spread quickly to the south. Most scientists say that the trigger, at least initially, was an orbital shift that caused more sunlight to fall across Earth's northern half. But how did...
Researchers here are hopeful that the new core they drilled through an ice field on the Antarctic Peninsula will contain ice dating back into the last ice age. If so, that record should give new insight into past global climate changes.The expedition in early winter to the Bruce Plateau, an ice field straddling a narrow ridge on the northernmost tongue of the southernmost continent, yielded a core that was 445.6 meters (1,462 feet) long, the longest yet recovered from that region of...
