A new paper with open access has appeared in Quaternary Science Reviews, authored by Patton et al.: Deglaciation of the Eurasian ice sheet complex, which offers a new model investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts.
According to the comments of professor Alun Hubbard, the paper’s second author and a leading glaciologist:
To place it in context, this is almost 10 times the current rates of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica today. What’s fascinating is that not all Eurasian ice retreat was from surface melting alone. Its northern and western sectors across the Barents Sea, Norway and Britain terminated directly into the sea. They underwent rapid collapse through calving of vast armadas of icebergs and undercutting of the ice margin by warm ocean currents.
Some speculate that at some points during the European deglaciation, this river system had a discharge twice that of the Amazon today. Based on our latest reconstruction of this system, we have calculated that its catchment area was similar to that of the Mississippi. It was certainly the largest river system to have ever drained the Eurasian continent.
One thing that we show pretty well in this study is that our simulation is relevant to a range of different research disciplines, not only glaciology. It can even be useful for archaeologists who look at human migration routes, and are interested to see how the European environment developed over the last 20,000 years.
Interesting is its effect on population movements in eastern Europe, including the steppe, the forest-steppe, and the Forest Zone, during the Younger Dryas period and thereafter.
Another, recent build-up article on this model also by Patton and cols. of december 2016, in the same journal, is The build-up, configuration, and dynamical sensitivity of the Eurasian ice-sheet complex to Late Weichselian climatic and oceanic forcing. A summary is found at the University of Tromso website.
Discovered via News at Phys.org.
Featured image: Younger Dryas period, from the article.
