Latest Quaternary glaciation Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In the next few centuries, Canada's Arctic Archipelago glaciers will melt faster than ever, according to a new study. Research has revealed that 20 percent of the Canadian Arctic glaciers may have disappeared by the end of our current century, leading to an additional sea level rise of 1.4 inches. The findings, funded in part by EU's ice2sea program, are available online and will be published in an upcoming issue of Geophysical...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, have found that greenhouse gas concentrations similar to the present – almost 400 parts per million - were systematically associated with sea levels at least 30 feet above current levels by comparing reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and sea level over the past 40 million years. The study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from an international team of scientists led by environmental physicists at Heidleberg University in Germany suggests that the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean was faster during the last Ice Age than today. It has long been assumed that heat transport in the Atlantic Ocean during the last Ice Age was weaker, but according to the new data, it appears that it was actually stronger than it currently is. The team used...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from the University of Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences has successfully reconstructed temperature from the deep sea to reveal how global ice volume has varied over the glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 1.5 million years. The study, "Evolution of ocean temperature and ice volume through the Mid-Pleistocene Climate Transition," reported in the journal Science, announces a major breakthrough in understanding...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have always linked the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide to a rise in global temperatures, but new research by an international team of scientists connects the cause and effect more strongly than ever before. According to their report recently published in the scientific journal Climate of the Past, the research team tested tiny bubbles of air trapped in layers of ice around Antarctica for carbon dioxide levels and...

First analyses of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the terrestrial Arctic provide documentation that intense warm intervals, warmer than scientists thought possible, occurred there over the past 2.8 million years First analyses of the longest sediment core ever collected on land in the terrestrial Arctic, published this week in Science, provide documentation that intense warm intervals, warmer than scientists thought possible, occurred there over the past 2.8 million...

A new study of lake sediment cores from Sanak Island in the western Gulf of Alaska suggests that deglaciation there from the last Ice Age took place as much as 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, opening the door for earlier coastal migration models for the Americas. The Sanak Island Biocomplexity Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, also concluded that the maximum thickness of the ice sheet in the Sanak Island region during the last glacial maximum was 70...

Researcher helps paint the fullest picture yet of how increases in CO2 helped end the ice age Harvard scientists are helping to paint the fullest picture yet of how a handful of factors, particularly world-wide increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, combined to end the last ice age approximately 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. As described in a paper published April 5 in Nature, researchers compiled ice and sedimentary core samples collected from dozens of locations around the world, and...

A new study published in the journal Nature provides evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels brought an end to the last Ice Age. The researchers analyzed prehistoric global warming and found that permafrost released massive amounts of carbon dioxide that was stored in frozen soil in Polar Regions. This resulted in climate change and increased global temperatures and ocean acidifications, ending the Ice Age. Lead author Jeremy Shakun said the key to understanding the role of carbon...

Why did the atmosphere contain so little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago? Why did it rise when the Earth's climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements. This study has now been published in the scientific journal "Science" by scientists from the Universities of Bern and Grenoble and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association....