Fast ice flow and unstable ice sheet behavior were characteristic features of the Lake Michigan Lobe of the southern Laurentide Ice Sheet. Such behavior may result from some combination of subglacial-sediment deformation and decoupled sliding at the ice-bed interface. Both mechanisms depend on high water pressure relative to ice pressure....
This dissertation concentrates on the controlling factors on the instability of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) and their effects on abrupt climate change. Northern Hemisphere climate fluctuated abruptly during the last deglaciation possibly related to variability in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and reduced aerial extent of the LIS. Reductions...
The results presented in this dissertation address a number of questions regarding late Pleistocene and Holocene ice-sheet and climate interactions, spanning disciplines involving paleoclimatology and atmospheric science. These studies use various techniques in geochemistry, climate modeling, and ice-sheet modeling to address ice- sheet response to climate and the attendant interactions...
The goal of this dissertation is to develop a chronology of the retreat of the southern margin of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) during the late Pleistocene using surface exposure dating with cosmogenic 10Be. A sequence of seven prominent moraines in northeastern Europe (the Leszno Moraine, the Pomeranian Moraine, the...
We investigate the stability of marine ice sheets by coupling a gravitationally self-consistent sea level model valid for a self-gravitating, viscoelastically deforming Earth to a 1-D marine ice sheet-shelf model. The evolution of the coupled model is explored for a suite of simulations in which we vary the bed slope...
Changes in the amount of summer incoming solar radiation (insolation) reaching the Northern Hemisphere are the underlying pacemaker of glacial cycles. However, not all rises in boreal summer insolation over the past 800,000 years resulted in deglaciation to present-day ice volumes, suggesting that there may be a climatic threshold for...
The impact of mountains and ice sheets on the large-scale circulation of the world’s oceans is investigated in a series of simulations with a new coupled ocean–atmosphere model [Oregon State University–University of Victoria model (OSUVic)], in which the height of orography is scaled from 1.5 times the actual height (at...
This thesis focuses on the application of the cosmogenic nuclide Beryllium-10 (10Be) in an effort to better constrain the thickness history of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet (FIS) at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and into the Holocene, as well as begin to answer the long-standing question regarding the age
and...
The goals of this dissertation are centered on understanding changes in Earth surface and climate systems through the use of geologic proxies as records of past changes in these systems. Specifically, this dissertation (1) establishes a new chronology for retreat of the Ross Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice...
We simulate three-dimensional ice temperature fields to examine spatial-temporal history of the subglacial thermal environment during the last glacial cycle. Model results suggest that 60–80% of the Laurentide Ice Sheet was cold-based (frozen to the bed) at the LGM, and therefore unable to undergo large-scale basal flow. The fraction of...
We review and synthesize the geologic record that
constrains the sources of sea level rise and freshwater discharge
to the global oceans associated with retreat of ice
sheets during the last deglaciation. The Last Glacial Maximum
(~26–19 ka) was terminated by a rapid 5–10 m sea
level rise at 19.0–19.5...
Simulations of past climates require altered
boundary conditions to account for known shifts in the Earth
system. For the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and subsequent
deglaciation, the existence of large Northern Hemisphere
ice sheets caused profound changes in surface topography
and albedo. While ice-sheet extent is fairly well
known, numerous...
We summarize 121 ¹⁴C and in-situ cosmogenic (¹⁰Be and ³⁶Cl) ages that constrain fluctuations of the Irish Ice Sheet (IIS) since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) that can be linked to abrupt climate changes in the North Atlantic region. These data provide a robust means to date ice-sheet fluctuations because...
The last deglaciation of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) from ∼21,000 to 13,000 yr ago is well-constrained by several hundred ¹⁰Be and ¹⁴C ages. The subsequent retreat history, however, is established primarily from minimum-limiting ¹⁴C ages and incomplete Baltic-Sea varve records, leaving a substantial fraction of final SIS retreat history...
Retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) following the Last Glacial Maximum 21 000 yr BP affected regional to global climate and accounted for the largest proportion of sea level rise. Although the late Pleistocene LIS retreat chronology is relatively well constrained, its Holocene chronology remains poorly dated, limiting our...
Early Holocene summer warmth drove dramatic Greenland ice sheet (GIS) retreat. Subsequent insolation-driven cooling caused GIS margin readvance to late Holocene maxima, from which ice margins are now retreating. We use ¹⁰Be surface exposure ages from four locations between 69.4°N and 61.2°N to date when in the early Holocene south...
Sea-level and ice-sheet databases have driven numerous advances in understanding the Earth system. We describe the challenges and offer best strategies that can be adopted to build self-consistent and standardised databases of geological and geochemical information used to archive palaeo-sea-levels and palaeo-ice-sheets. There are three phases in the development of...
We report a decadally resolved record of atmospheric CO₂ concentration for the last 1000 years, obtained from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide shallow ice core. The most prominent feature of the pre-industrial period is a rapid ∼7 ppm decrease of CO₂ in a span of ∼20–50 years at...