History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: paleoclimatic insights
Section snippets
Overview
The Greenland Ice Sheet (Fig. 1) is approximately 1.7 million km2 in area, extending as much as 2200 km north to south. The maximum ice thickness is 3367 m, the average thickness is 1600 m (Thomas et al., 2001), and the volume is 2.9 million km3 (Bamber et al., 2001). The ice has depressed some bedrock below sea level, and a little would remain below sea level following ice removal and bedrock rebound (Bamber et al., 2001). However, most of the ice rests on bedrock above sea level and would
Paleoclimatic indicators bearing on ice-sheet history
Here, marine indicators of ice-sheet change are discussed, followed by terrestrial archives. For a broader overview, see, e.g., Cronin (1999) or Bradley (1999).
Ice-sheet onset and early fluctuations
Before 65 Ma, dinosaurs lived on a high-CO2, world that was warm to high latitudes; mean-annual temperature exceeded 14 °C at 71°N based on occurrence of crocodile-like champsosaurs (Tarduno et al., 1998; also see Markwick, 1998, Vandermark et al., 2007). The ocean surface near the North Pole warmed from ∼18 °C to a peak of ∼23 °C during the short-lived Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 Ma (Sluijs et al., 2006). Such warm temperatures preclude permanent ice near sea level and, indeed, no
Discussion
Glaciers and ice sheets are controlled by many climatic factors and by internal dynamics. Attribution of a given ice-sheet change to a particular cause is generally difficult, and requires appropriate modeling and related studies.
It remains, however, that in the suite of observations as a whole, the behavior of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been more closely tied to temperature than to anything else. The Greenland Ice Sheet shrank with warming and grew with cooling. Because of the generally
Synopsis
Paleoclimatic data show that the Greenland Ice Sheet has changed greatly with time. From physical understanding, many environmental factors can force changes in the size of an ice sheet. Comparison of the histories of important forcings and of ice-sheet size implicates cooling as causing ice-sheet growth, warming as causing shrinkage, and sufficiently large warming as causing loss. The evidence for temperature control is clearest for temperatures similar to or warmer than recent values (the
Acknowledgements
RBA acknowledges partial support from the US National Science Foundation under grants 0531211 and 0424589. GHM acknowledges partial support from the US National Science Foundation under grants ARC0714074 and ATM0318479. LP acknowledges partial support from the US National Science Foundation under grants ARC0612473 and 0806999. JWCW acknowledges partial support from the US National Science Foundation under grants 0806387, 053759, and 059512. BLO acknowledges support from the US National Science
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