Minimal East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat onto land during the past eight million years

Shakun, Jeremy D.; Corbett, Lee B.; Bierman, Paul R.; Underwood, Kristen; Rizzo, Donna M.; Zimmerman, Susan R.; Caffee, Marc W.; Naish, Tim; Golledge, Nicholas R.; Hay, Carling C.

doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0155-6

Minimal East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat onto land during the past eight million years

Journal Article · Wed Jun 13 04:00:00 EDT 2018 · Nature (London)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0155-6· OSTI ID:1905199

Shakun, Jeremy D. ^[1]; Corbett, Lee B. ^[2]; Bierman, Paul R. ^[2]; Underwood, Kristen ^[2]; Rizzo, Donna M. ^[2]; Zimmerman, Susan R. ^[3]; Caffee, Marc W. ^[4]; Naish, Tim ^[5]; Golledge, Nicholas R. ^[5]; Hay, Carling C. ^[1]

Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States)
University of Vermont, Burlington, VT (United States)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN (United States)
Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)

We report the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is the largest potential contributor to sea-level rise. However, efforts to predict the future evolution of the EAIS are hindered by uncertainty in how it responded to past warm periods, for example, during the Pliocene epoch (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago), when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were last higher than 400 parts per million. Geological evidence indicates that some marine-based portions of the EAIS and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated during parts of the Pliocene, but it remains unclear whether ice grounded above sea level also experienced retreat. This uncertainty persists because global sea-level estimates for the Pliocene have large uncertainties and cannot be used to rule out substantial terrestrial ice loss, and also because direct geological evidence bearing on past ice retreat on land is lacking. Here we show that land-based sectors of the EAIS that drain into the Ross Sea have been stable throughout the past eight million years. We base this conclusion on the extremely low concentrations of cosmogenic ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al isotopes found in quartz sand extracted from a land-proximal marine sediment core. This sediment had been eroded from the continent, and its low levels of cosmogenic nuclides indicate that it experienced only minimal exposure to cosmic radiation, suggesting that the sediment source regions were covered in ice. These findings indicate that atmospheric warming during the past eight million years was insufficient to cause widespread or long-lasting meltback of the EAIS margin onto land. We suggest that variations in Antarctic ice volume in response to the range of global temperatures experienced over this period—up to 2–3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, corresponding to future scenarios involving carbon dioxide concentrations of between 400 and 500 parts per million—were instead driven mostly by the retreat of marine ice margins, in agreement with the latest models.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); National Science Foundation (NSF); Boston College; New Zealand Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment

Grant/Contract Number:: AC52-07NA27344

OSTI ID:: 1905199

Report Number(s):: LLNL-JRNL-735619; 888131

Journal Information:: Nature (London), Journal Name: Nature (London) Journal Issue: 7709 Vol. 558; ISSN 0028-0836

Publisher:: Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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