An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University, has found that the climatic events that ended the ice age before last are surprisingly different to those of the last ice age.
These findings will help scientists understand the processes that control Earth’s dramatic climate changes at the end of an ice age.
The team, which includes researchers the University of Swansea and The Australian National University (ANU), has published their findings in Nature.
At the end of an ice age continental ice sheets, oceans and atmosphere change rapidly. Scientists have previously only been able to reconstruct in detail the changes at the end of the last ice age.
The study found that the sequence of climate events 135,000 years ago looks very different from what happened at the end of the last ice age, about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Ice-ages may superficially look similar to one another, but there are important differences in the relationships between the melting of continental ice sheets and global climate changes.
Co-author Professor Eelco Rohling, from the University and ANU said,
“At the end of the last ice age, rapid melting of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and major climate changes did not occur at the same time. At the end of the ice-age before last, 135,000 years ago, a rapid collapse of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets into the North Atlantic Ocean suppressed ocean circulation, and caused global climate impacts.
“The North Atlantic cooled while the Southern Ocean warmed. The latter destabilised Antarctic land ice, causing a continuation of melting that eventually drove sea level rise to several metres above the present,” he said.