Over the past 40,000 years, ice sheets thousands of kilometres apart have influenced one another through sea level changes, according to research published today in Nature. The study demonstrates, for the first time, that during this period, changes in the Antarctic ice sheet were driven by the melting ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. “Ice sheets can influence each other over great distances due to the water that flows between them,” explains senior author Natalya Gomez, from McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Water and ice sheets on the moveThe records suggest that the ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet over this period was significant, with intermittent periods of accelerated retreat. In the modern era, we haven’t seen the kind of large ice sheet retreat that we might see in our future warming world.
